accepted cultures

[AkwatiKata]

I am trying to play as India, so I created it by simply starting the game as the UK and releasing India. To my disappointment, it did not have all of its cultures as accepted. India has claims in a whole bunch of provinces yet does not accept their cultures. I looked in the cultures.txt and at the end of "south_asian" cultures it says "union = HND" yet I only get Marathi as primary and Avadhi, Bihari, Tamil and Kanauji as secondary.
So what does "union = HND" really mean?
Also, how do I add accepted cultures to cultural unions and can I have more than one primary culture?
I know this is impossible in-game, I am talking about file editing

edit:
and what does "is_overseas = no" mean?
I also know simply adding a culture in the save file will make it accepted, but is there another way that will automatically add the remaining south_asian cultures as accepted?

another edit: I just ran another test with Morocco and Tripoli. Morocco has Maghrebi as primary and accepts Berber. Tripoli has Maghrebi primary and accepts Tuareg and Bedouin. Tuareg is not an Arab culture. When I form the cultural union Arabia as Tripoli, it keeps Tuareg as an accepted culture. Morocco does not accept Tuareg and when it forms Arabia it keeps not accepting Tuareg.

 

[Savolainen5]

Union = HND means that the game treats India as any of those cultures' overall country. Among other things, if HND exists along with an independent country having one of the South Asian cultures as its primary, it may petition India for annexation.

If you want to make all Indian culture accepted by India, you can edit the country history file and add them in. Short of writing an event, there's no other way than editing the files.

Overseas = no means that whatever you're looking at is on the same continent.

Countries, unless otherwise specified, keep their base accepted cultures when forming new nations. That's why some people love playing Luxembourg and making Germany, because then you keep French as an accepted culture.

 

[AkwatiKata]

Thank you. That was helpful. So have you tested this requested annexation? If a country whose primary and accepted cultures are not accepted by the cultural union requests annexation from its cultural union, will their culture become accepted? For example Mysore has Kannada as its primary culture. If it requests annexation from HND and gets annexed, will Kannada then become an accepted culture?
Thanks

 

[Savolainen5]

No, inheriting countries who have a different culture from you (but are in the same cultural union) will not add their culture to your accepted ones. Rather, it's like this. If you're the cultural union country, you will randomly get events started by countries having cultures within the union to join your country. All it does is cause them to be inherited by the union. No accepted culture additions are involved.

So in short, it won't work like that for Mysore.

However, NNM's Indian unification decision (which is probably included in almost all other mods) will add all the major cultures of the northern part of India, excluding Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and anything else in the south.

 

[AkwatiKata]

I ran some tests with the cultural union Arabia and found out if I manually added accepted cultures to the save file before my nation becomes a Great Power, somehow it gets stuck as a non-GP. In the rankings it is well above #8 and on one test it even became #1 and stayed like that for more than two years, but never became a GP. Has anyone else tested this with different results? Also, will the same thing happen if I edit the history files?