Why no Australians?

ben606 said:

There is an Australian culture in the game files but it must have never been implemented, even though the switch would be easy. I have created my own mini-mod for when I want to play as Australia and have a unique culture so its not so much of a complaint than an inquiry. Why not implement it into the game? If Canada deserves its own Anglo-Canadian culture then why not Australia?

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There are mods that have the Australian culture. Otherwise, you can just replace British with Australian in the pop files (I think).

Every specific culture adds more load to the system which can already be heavy end-game (game slows down because it has to deal with much more pops), so they add a culture only if it adds significantly to the gameplay or was so important in the timeframe that you can't ignore it.
The duality between French-Canadian and Anglo-Canadian was considered important enough (as the possibility of releasing Quebec), while Australie never experienced this kind of cultural tension.
Would you really said that in 1850 people in Australia already had a strong national identity ? I often heard that it was WWI which gave a sense of a distinctive self to australians.

i wouldnt say in 1836 that there would be much difference between a british and Australian, maybe there could have been an event towards the end after a great war but meh.

There are three problems (within the game engine):

1. It's not possible to assimilate into a culture that isn't already present in a province (so newly colonised territories will only get the seed culture when they arbitrarily migrate there, which is never a sure thing)

2. It's not possible to assimilate primary or accepted POPs (so British POPs who migrate to Australia will never become Australian)

3. Where the primary culture outnumbers the accepted culture (as will eventually happen to sparsely populated colonies) new migrants will assimilate into the primary culture rather than the accepted one.

Each of these would alone be enough to preclude Australian becoming widespread, all three of them make it pretty much impossible, so it might as well be removed. Hopefully V3 will have a more fluid cultural assimilation process to allow development of regional cultures like this.

It's possible to see a few more Australians even within these bounds by making an ahistorically early Australian Dominion so that it has its own primary culture.

Faulty explained it really well.

This comes from a fundamental flaw with how POPs work. You cannot create POPs from nothing, you cannot change POP culture through event, and POPs will not assimilate to non-majority accepted POPs. Meaning, it's impossible to create a culture and make it prosper if it didn't exist at start.

An Australian culture would need to either exist at start or be "transferred" from another province. The former results in a more extreme version of what happens between Yankee, Dixie, and immigrant POPs in the United States where a Yankee plurality appears in a Dixie province and the becomes majority because all POPs start assimilating to Yankee since it's the primary culture. You would have Britons move to Australia, become plurality, and then cause all other immigrants to assimilate to British rather than Australian. The latter would mean that Australian POPs would need to be "stored" in some uninhabited province and then have an event/decision that kills the British POPs and then replace them with the Australian POPs when you feel that it's time for the Australian culture to appear, ideally when Australia becomes independent to prevent the assimilation issue. However, this not only requires the POPs to be stored somewhere like some random Pacific island or the Sahara Desert but is also unable to account for how big the POP size, ideology, etc. It's messy to say the least and usually doesn't work.

Simply put, it's just not feasible without changes to the engine that I'm sure Paradox just didn't feel like making.

I'm an australian and no one (i know) sees them slef as an 'australian' they seem them selfs as australian citizens and apart of 'australian culture'. Like thier is one kid who is like 1/32 Finnish but cling ones to it as apart of his identity, similar how I do that to german and polish

Jacobi-99 said:

I'm an australian and no one (i know) sees them slef as an 'australian' they seem them selfs as australian citizens and apart of 'australian culture'. Like thier is one kid who is like 1/32 Finnish but cling ones to it as apart of his identity, similar how I do that to german and polish

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Americans do the same, at least here where I am. Heritage is constantly brought up, and America is their home while 'X-American' is their culture. Replace X with any nationality.

El Jojo said:

Every specific culture adds more load to the system

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Is this true? If so, do those various African cultures that aren't accepted anywhere significantly slow down the game?

China is OP said:

Is this true? If so, do those various African cultures that aren't accepted anywhere significantly slow down the game?

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The more ways to divide POPs that you have, the slower the game will be. If you have 1,000 craftsmen, 250 are North German Protestants, 250 are South German Protestants, 250 are North German Catholics, and and 250 are South German Catholics, then you have 4 separate POPs. Multiply that to include other types like bureaucrats, clergy, soldiers, and officers. You are now at 20 for those five alone.

This adds up really fast.