Suggestions for AHD

[CaptRobau]

Victoria 2's cultures are in need of revision. Not only should some cultures be added (British should be divided in English, Scottish and Welsh), reworked (Dutch should be divided into Northern and Southern Dutch, the latter replacing Flemish as Southern culture is probably more similar to Flanders than to the North, with Walloon POPs becoming French) or removed (such as Texan, which is only set apart from Dixie by it's succesful revolution, which is still not a certainty in early 1836), but most importantly the rules for assimilation should be redone as well.

The mod Age of Colonialism does this real well. It limits assimilation between various culture groups, which makes sense. An Englishman can learn Portuguese, move to Brazil and after a few years be accepted by his country members as being Brazilian. Yet an English-speaking Indian can be the richest man in London and he will still be considered as Indian.

Here's a further explanation from the AoC thread:

Only Europeans (this includes Latin Americans & Yankee/Dixie/Texan) can assimilate to other European cultures. Members of the Turko-Semitic and Persian-Turanian culture groups can assimilate to each other (Persians, Misri, Berbers, and Turks for example). Members of the south east Asian and east Asian culture groups can assimilate to each other. Members of African culture groups may assimilate to each other (this includes African diaspora). All other culture groups, native Americans (Zapotec etc), central Asians (Mongol, Tibetan etc), south Asians (Indians), may only assimilate within their own culture group.

Now you can watch as racial prejudice is accurately modeled in your game! 19th century earth was not a hyper-globalized egalitarian planet!

Are you also distraught by hordes of unaccepted pops swelling your soldiers ranks despite having a moralistic anti-foreigner society?

Now pops will consider their position in your society before wanting to fight for you. That Native-American won't want to fight for your bigoted moralism/residency USA!

A system like this might be refined even further by adding cultures like Mestizo and Mulatto. These people of mixed race often had a better shot at acceptance (perhaps due to racial characteristics fading away generation, after generation). This would allow Afro-Americans to first become Mulatto and then become Yankee.

 

[yodaime]

Sorry if someone mentioned it earlier, but I would really fancy ability to add certain culture to your country's accepted cultures after some time. I mean, there's 10 million people of certain culture that will never assimilate, your country has Full Citizenship and treats all citizens equally. Would make sense to add certain culture to accepted if say you have above certain amount of % of population of this culture and fulfil some other requirements.

 

[Derp]

Victoria 2's cultures are in need of revision.

...

I believe there's an actual technical reason why this isn't done more in the base game; since pops are calculated individually (unlike EU3, where culture/ethnicity is just a simple province variable) the more of them you add the more load it inevitably puts on the processor. Assimilation helps keep this under control since it can fold all the tiny, disparate pops into one large, simple blob.

With game performance being an everpresent concern I'd prefer this sort of thing to be left to mods.

 

[Gorgo Primus]

The Bretons, Basques, Occitans, etc, should really be added. And before anyone says that they can't because there isn't enough data on population numbers fr them in France or w/e, I will note that the reason why there is far less data on the populations of these groups in France in this era isn't because they didn't exist, but because the French had begun a long campaign to erase their cultures and languages to make France more uniform in culture/language to 'protect the republic' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha).

Adding cultures and revolter states for these people (Catalonia has a culture in game, but I don't think they have a revolter state) would go a long way into making V2 a better and more accurate game, as it would reflect the real Victorian world in more detail and force players to deal with placating or oppressing their large minority populations in the west; as opposed to being one big happy ahistorically homogeneous state in the game at present. Spain and France have/had a great deal of cultural and linguistic diversity that are worth simulating.

It's not like these were small one province culture deals, the Occitans language was spoken by a little under half the population of France in the 1800s, and in Brittany only around ~20% of the population spoke French for the longest time. This is on a scale such that to regulate it to the worlds of mods only would mean losing out on the cultural dynamics that had profound impacts on how the states functioned both then and now.

 

[CaptRobau]

I believe there's an actual technical reason why this isn't done more in the base game; since pops are calculated individually (unlike EU3, where culture/ethnicity is just a simple province variable) the more of them you add the more load it inevitably puts on the processor. Assimilation helps keep this under control since it can fold all the tiny, disparate pops into one large, simple blob.

With game performance being an everpresent concern I'd prefer this sort of thing to be left to mods.

A quote from Van Diemen, one the developers of AoC:

I think that the reduced amount of units and the very low amount of assimilation actually helps in both ways. Reducing assimilation was never really a large problem for performance anyway, but the huge amount of units you sometimes could get was certainly a major factor on game performance. Extremely large peacetime armies have been mostly become impossible to sustain, thus making this game both much more realistic and furthermore also helping performance a great deal.

So, assimilation isn't as large a system hog as you might think. I can vouch for AoC's speed, it's at least equal to vanilla. By making Indians unable to assimilate to British for example you'll have less infantry that you'll be able to build. While you might build irregulars with them, this is only possible if you treat them well (it's explained in the AoC thread how this works), which is quite . The AI in AoC also scraps old ships meaning smaller but more up-to-date navies. Furthermore various changes in AHD will free up power for more simulations anyway:

* Multi-core support - A majority of players has at least a dual-core processor by now
* No more railroad spam - Less time spent by the game tracking how far those hundred railroads are coming along in 1836 Russia.
* No more dreadnought spam - Less units is higher speed
* Improved mobilization rules - Makes mobilization more useful, probably resulting in less units

 

[RedRalphWiggum]

I don't know... is it really plausible that France could have been split that way?

 

[Santôka]

I don't know... is it really plausible that France could have been split that way?

Not only will adding most sub cultures alot of mods already add make the game more historical, but it will also balance the game : in France's case, having Breton and Basque culture as not accepted reduces the scientific, economic and military contribution of those regions, which is a nice step to reduce France's proverbial OPness.