CKIII Dev Diary #27 - Cultures & Cultural Innovations

[Wokeg]

Greetings, dear friends, and welcome to the cultural dev diary! Today, we’re going to be going over some familiar mechanics from CK2, and, relatedly, our decidedly less familiar all-new tech system!

Cultures & Culture Groups
The basic structure of the cultural system will be fairly recognisable to many of you. Every county and character on the map has a culture, representing (usually) the majority demographic for that county or the preferred customs of that character. Most cultures are based around a language, but some focus more on dialect or specific bodies of tradition, and a few are even primarily just regional.

Every culture, in turn, belongs to a culture group. These are gatherings of several cultures that, whilst distinct from one another, are nevertheless closely related. Most often this is down to a shared root culture, but in a few cases cultures have entered the same group merely by cohabiting for a long period of time.

Characters who come from completely different cultures like each other less, with characters who come from different cultures within the same group taking a reduced penalty. Like CK2, this only matters within your realm, so you won’t get grumpy at your neighbour for being different unless you’re occasionally required to talk to the lad.

Cultural preferences carry over to the peasantry: if the lord who directly holds a particular county doesn’t share that county’s culture, then that county will take a hit to popular opinion (with the hit being smaller if they’re at least part of the same culture group).

Of course, as this is only the direct holder of a county, having a good friend who understands the local customs in charge of all these strange foreign peasants can be an excellent way to stave off peasant revolts...

But what about...
… Melting pots and culture splits? Still got ‘em! We’ve even got some fancy new scripted effects to make it easier than ever to add your own.

Culture conversion is also more easily accessible: per the council task dev diary, this is now a council task, performed by your steward. You can attempt to culture convert any county in your sub-realm, though without an excellent steward or certain types of faith, it’ll likely take a while. People seldom change their culture quickly or willingly.

Show us the good stuff!
Ahhhhhh, you want to see some maps? See how granular we’re getting with our cultural setup this time around? Well, maps I’ve got! How many new cultures can you pick out?

Cultural & Technology
In CK3, cultures mean a lot more than just a few points of opinion here and there. Cultures are now an integral part of our reworked system for technology, with eras, explicit innovations, and mechanics for tussling over the cultural heart of your people.

Innovations
Innovations are the very heart of CK3’s technological system. Each one represents a thorough proliferation of an idea, a legal practice, or a specific technology, taken to heart by any given culture, or still weird and foreign no matter its advantages. As the game progresses, cultures will slowly become more and more accustomed to the various innovations, until each innovation is thoroughly embraced and ubiquitous amongst the people of that culture. At that point, an innovation is considered “unlocked”, and its unique benefits are accessible to characters and counties of the unlocking culture.

Benefits for each innovation vary tremendously between them. Some unlock new and better forms of succession law, some give bonuses to growth or income, some allow access to specific Men-at-Arms, or even grant entirely new CBs. We have innovations for everything from battlements to bombards, from coinage to cranes, and wootz steel to wierdijks!

Innovations broadly fall into one of three categories: military, civic, and special (a.k.a, "Cultural and Regional"), each grouped together in the interface.

Military and civic innovations typically cover what you might expect (martial and non-martial matters, respectively). All cultures can, eventually, acquire all military and civic innovations.

Special innovations behave a bit differently. A few are unlocked via special decisions and can only be acquired by taking those decisions, whilst some are cultural, requiring you to belong to a specific culture or culture group, but most are regional innovations.

Regional innovations require you to either have at least a certain number of counties within a specific area to unlock, or else to have a certain percentage of your culture’s total counties within that area. They represent concepts and technologies that were specific to certain areas historically, rather than spreading across large areas of the globe, but which could very easily have been developed by any culture moving into that area.

Needless to say, innovations, the bonuses they provide, and the mechanics they unlock are all fully scriptable and can be modded with ease.

But how do I *unlock* an innovation?
All innovations have a small chance to progress towards being unlocked per month, affected by a few factors, with the most telling one being average development of the sum counties a culture holds. A culture that spreads recklessly will have naturally slower growth than one that exists in concentrated pockets of high development.

The major ways generation progress towards unlocking innovations are setting fascinations and exposure. Each of these affect only a single innovation at a time, though both happen simultaneously.

Exposure is a natural process, occurring when your culture has counties that border another culture with a specific innovation. The more you have in common (culture group, religion, and so on) with that other culture, and the more of its counties your culture borders, the faster you’ll unlock that innovation.

Fascination, by contrast, is an entirely character-driven process, reflecting the drive of powerful leaders to introduce new concepts and technologies (be they original or imported) to their people. Where exposure is selected randomly from suitable innovations, fascination is deliberately selected by a specific character.

Who gets to pick? Why, the cultural head.

Any culture with at least one landed ruler somewhere has a cultural head, who then has complete control over which fascination is selected from available innovations. The cultural head always shares the culture they are the head of, and is the character with the most counties of that culture within their sub-realm in the world.

As you can imagine, the size of the culture makes a difference in how easy it is to become (and stay) cultural head: there are many more Andalusian counties than there are, say, Cornish ones.

An important factor in unlocking innovations via fascination is the learning skill of the cultural head. An unlearned cultural head doesn’t do much to bring new ideas and technologies to their people, but an erudite scholar knows who to invite to court, how to phrase ideas in a way the peasants will accept, and how to get the nobility to see the benefit of embracing a foreign concept!

Eras
You might be thinking that this sounds a little bit disorganised. What stops me, say, unlocking bombards in the 900s and blowing my enemies away with oversized canons for the next five hundred years?

The answer to that is eras.

In CK3, all innovations are organised into one of four eras, before being categorised into military, civic, or special. In order to begin unlocking innovations from an era, you need to have actually reached that era.

If an innovation belongs to the Tribal Era, no problem. All cultures start with the tribal era reached, and many primarily-feudal cultures will start with most (if not all) of its innovations unlocked, especially in 1066.

For the eras beyond that (the Early Medieval, High Medieval, and Late Medieval), you need to meet two criteria. The date must be at least an appropriate minimum year (e.g., the high medieval period cannot start before 1050 AD), and you must have at least 50% of the preceding era’s innovations unlocked. Further, if your cultural head is tribal, you will be unable to progress to the next era until you obtain a non-tribal cultural head. Cultures that have just left the Tribal Era will unlock innovations faster for a time, allowing them to catch up a little as medieval social and legal structures begin sweeping their lands.

Eras therefore let us gate technologies and features in stages, so that cultures which thrived in later centuries can still use their special bonuses, units, and features, but don’t get them too anachronistically.

Aaaand that about wraps it up for cultures and technology! I’ll be around the thread to answer questions for the next couple of hours, but otherwise, we’ll see you next week!

 

[Wokeg]

Cool work! Although are their any culture maps of the full 867 start date? I’ve seen some full 1066 going around but the 867 one cuts out most of Africa and Asia.
Another question is whether Coptic culture will be in Egypt, since the 106) start date doesn’t have it...
The game just keeps getting better, cultures went from being literally useless in Ck2 to having what seems like a major game mechanic in ck3!

Glad you like it! We currently don't have Coptic in, but that's not to say it's been axed forever.

Can you give us peak at some of the “special innovations”

Screenshot #6 m'friend.

Why is it a good idea to have static era dates? Wouldn't it make much more sense to have dynamic criteria?

What happens, for instance, if your culture has unlocked everything available for its time period? It just has to wait for the right year to arrive before it can progress further?

The title is balanced so that such a situation is unlikely to commonly appear (i.e., maybe once per game for the player if they were *really* trying to break-neck progress through innovations and little else), but here, I'm afraid that yes, that is the case. You can definitely be quite far ahead technologically, you can even be immensely far ahead of less developed cultures, but there is that slight upper limit to exactly how much more advanced you can be.

This was pretty cool! It would be cool to have the full list of cultures, i'm really excited for that.

Also are the melting pots and culture splits the same as in CK2 or are there new ones too?

Most of the old ones from CK2, a handful of new ones, and hopefully many more to come over time! Cultures are a lot of fun to make and implement, but we've also got to do a fair amount of research to try and get them right, so it's something we'll doubtless add to going forwards.

Speaking of cultures, vaguely, will "Poganstvo" be changed? In most slavic languages it means... very bad things... so far there has been no word on the devs thoughts about this. Understandable that it's not slavic since "Slavic Faith" group but still. Being derogatory seems like a step back.

Poganstvo has been changed.

I don't know how I feel about Anglo-Saxons as a single culture. In 867, there seems to have been a distinction between the Angles of Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia, as opposed to the southern Saxons. Alfred the Great began the efforts of unifying the two cultures, but Mercians continued considering themselves different people from the Saxons long after his death. Therefore, I'd suggest that in 867, there would be cultures of Saxon and Anglish, but in 1066 they would have melted into Anglo-Saxon.

This is something that's been discussed a little internally, but we've no firm plans on it yet, and it won't be like this for launch, I'm afraid.

Is there a Briton culture? What about Icelandic?

Not quite sure what you mean by "Briton": we have three Brythonic cultures (Cornish, Welsh, & Breton), but Briton in the Roman sense is long-dead by 867, and British in the modern sense is almost a thousand years away. Icelandic, as in CK2, is represented by Iceland alone retaining Norse culture in 1066.

Does the technology you have access to, say succession laws, depend on the characters culture or the province culture of the capital?

What prevents some scottish backwater noble to culture flip to greek or have his heir educated as greek and immediately gain access to all innovations unlocked by Byzantium?

Character culture! And, well, sure! I don't think your vassals are likely to necessarily take that well, and the peasants will resent some uppity foreigner coming in and telling them that their traditions are bunkum (at least until you educate them till they think they're Greek too). Selling your local traditions down the line for technological advancement is, sadly, a bit of a human tradition, I'm afraid.

So Crusader Kings finally has embraced the division of the Middle Ages in Dark Age, Feudal Age, Castle Age and Imperial Age

Naturally. We have, pre-emptively, mined all stone from the new map, so only PDS will be able to build castles, but that's more of a security thing, you understand.

What if I am the Head of more than just one culture?

Characters only get one culture, and you can't be the head of a culture you don't belong to.

Is it possible to change character Culture?

It is, though not necessarily easily.

Does this imply that cultural heads don't have to be independant, some of the earlier screenshots seem to imply they had to be independant?

Also how hard a requirment is there on the system for there to always be a cultural head?

Will there be cultures without cultural heads? Will they be at a disadvantage / only gain through exposure?

How does changing culture work as a non-member? I suppose there is no county level tech now?

I am so in love with this system with how you've taken the most un-fleshed out parts of CK2 and combined them but I have so many things to wrap my head around.

This is a departure though. Does this not clamp down on or entirely eliminate staying tribal long term, which was very much viable in CK2 tech economy and taxes be damned.

Cultural heads do not have to be independent. Indeed, many won't be, since we have more than a few mighty empires scattered around that totally subsume cultures within their borders.

It is actually technically possible not to have a head (you'd need to have absolutely _no_ landed rulers of that culture), but you're not disadvantaged for it. Such cultures just get a random fascination and innovate as though they had a cultural head with poor (but not terrible) learning.

Nope, no county tech levels any more! I'm afraid I'm unsure what ye mean about changing culture as a non-member.

It certainly makes it harder. If you're really determined, you can still do it, but your neighbours will slowly begin to outpace you technologically over time.

 

[Wokeg]

Great Dev Diary, sounds like a really fun system!

A few questions:
- How will new but historical cultures (e.g. portuguese) emerge in CK3? Same way as CK2?
- How will the innovations and tech system work for these new cultures? Will the new culture inherit the previous culture's tech and innovations when it spawns?
- Do some of these emerging cultures have special innovations like the cultures present at start?
- How about when my character changes culture, do i instantly adopt the new culture's tech and innovations? Is there a cooldown for when the player can change cultures again?

Thanks!

Depends on the culture: some come about via decision, some via event, so it's fairly case-by-case. Typically, a new culture takes all non-special innovations from its predecessor(s): for instance, Norman takes all of the non-special innovations from both French and Norse.

Some do, yes. Depends on culture and region!

It's not quite so trivial a thing to change your culture, but yes, you gain access to the affects of the innovations instantly.

Also are there going to be like split off cultures / events for Cisalpine?

Some of us are very confused by Cisalpine culture and Italian culture on the same map.

We don't have anything for splitting Cisalpine at the moment, I'm afraid, but that's not necessarily a hard stance.

Amazing work!
Are cultural innovations tied to a culture worldwide or to a culture in a realm?

Worldwide, though most cultures aren't especially far-flung.

Love to hear about some of the melting pots and decisions! Agreed too that Basque should extend into Aquitaine.

Are there still cultural specific features like Basque/Zhangzhung equality and Tanistry? Do they count as special innovations? If so, does that mean Irish/Welsh etc can only use Tanistry in certain eras?

With some exceptions, those are mostly special innovations now (or decided by faith doctrine, if appropriate), but yes, they're still around!

To be clear: special innovations are restricted in where/who can develop them, but not where they can be used. Irish characters could still use tanistry in India, if they ended up there.

3 questions :

Technology is bound to culture or culture group ?

Is it still possible to easily change our own culture like in CK2 in 1 click ?

What happen when we change culture, we lose the innovation from the old culture ? like the specific men at arm disappear ?

Culture, yes (though I'd argue that's not an easy or light change to make), and yes to losing access to any old innovations that your new culture lacks. MaA do not disappear, but you can't recruit any more of a type you no longer have access to.

I want to know; that since technology is related to culture; if I’m a Celtic ruler and own a lot of Norse provinces; will I be able to have Viking Longships?

Actually, yes! Per the dev diary, if either a certain percentage of counties within Scandinavia were to become Irish, or if a certain total percentage of Irish counties were in Scandinavia, you'd be able to start unlocking the longships innovation, as your culture would have effectively become a part of the Scandinavian cultural sphere.

Wait until you read the next Dev Diary on monks and religious conversion - it’s titled Woolooloo

We're anticipating record likes on that one, yes.

Very nice changes. However, is "Gaelic" a correct term for proto-Scottish? I mean, Irish are also Gaelic. I suppose that "Gaelic" represents the Irish who settled in Scotland (Dal Riata). Maybe Irish split from Gaelic?

Gaelic is not a term for proto-Scottish, but for the mainland Gaels. Scottish culture splits from Anglo-Saxon in de jure k_scotland. Scotland in 1066 is actually one of my favourite cultural setups in the game, as the battle for hegemony of Alba could go either way between the highland Gaels and the lowland Scots. Or you could be cool and bet on the Cumbrian underdogs, though they're doing much better in 867.

Oooh. Could you be so kind as to say what does that "Reconquista" innovation does for the hispanic catholics? Sounds exciting

Increases passive piety gain (which is kinda fantastic) and decrease holy war CB piety cost. Makes the Reconquista much more lively!

What the game really needs is minority cultures/religion. Maybe not everywhere as some regions were monolithic. But there should be the option to have minorities in counties. That way they don't get eradicated as time goes on.

Lovely concept, sadly nothing we'll have for release.

This is a nice new direction for CKIII to take, looking forward to geting my hands on it.


But eeeeh... *insert meme picture here* Ya'll got some more of those culture mapmode screenshots?

They were a *touch* more dramatic before articles started to come out and stole all my thunder. Afraid those are all I was approved to show!

 

[Wokeg]

I reeeeeaaaaaaaaly hope there will be a Silesian melting pot culture at some point... But I guess that hope is for naught

No Silesian melting pot culture at the moment, but never say never!

Will spouses' culture have an effect on culture opinion?

At launch, no, but we really want to do more with spouses in the game over-time, emphasising the important role they often tended to play in administering to the realm and as a figurehead for popular (and unpopular) policies.

There are some areas where the cultural head will be obvious and never changing. The Byzantine emperor will almost always be the head of the Greek culture, for example. But there are also areas where that may not necessarily be the case. In India in the 1066 start date, at least in CK2, there are 2 Telugu dukes of roughly equal strength who together own all of the Telugu provinces. If one of them became more powerful than the other, then would that duke become the new cultural head, or would the old cultural head have to die first? Would it be possible to become the new cultural head even if most of their provinces were of a different culture? Are province sizes or importance taken into account (like say even though you own more provinces than me, I own Paris which counts a lot more than your provinces.)

The only counties that matter are the ones in your sub-realm of your culture: if you're a Welsh king with fifty Irish counties, but only one Welsh county, you only have one Welsh county.

Generally, I believe cultural heads are recalculated every X years or so (I want to say five, but I'm not totally sure), unless someone dies, and we look at who has the most counties in their sub-realm of a culture who shares that culture. If it's a tie, it goes to learning, and if that ties, it goes to whoever is the player, and if that ties, it's randomised.

We don't currently discriminate based on development, I'm afraid, so it's currently raw mass of land. Advantages and disadvantages either way on that one.

Are the melting pots dynamic or fixed?

Fixed, but they're fairly easy to set up now, so we'll hopefully be able to be more extensive with them in future.

While the culture system certainly seems interesting I cannot ignore the glaring and quite frankly offensive mistake this Dev Diary as shown.
The proud County of Devon is not, will not and has never been Cornish!

As a proud Gloucestershirian, infuriating the good people of Devon is how I sustain myself day-to-day, I'm afraid.

Will the Romani be added?

Not for launch, I'm afraid.

Is it possible to lose an innovation if it falls sufficiently out of favor within your society?

Like, let's say you are playing as an Arab nation, and so your society is pretty decentralized because it's a large space to govern with comparatively low population. You take over Persia, as historically, and inherit their administrators, as historically, and so centralize your governance. Over time, will you forget particular innovations that made your decentralized system effective, so that if you lose Persia you would have to figure out how to make that old system work again? I feel like this would be a really neat system to include but you make no mention of lost innovations either way.

Also, the number one thing that irritates me about CK2: will it be possible to deliberately recruit a courtier of a culture that my character is not but which I do control a province of? Especially since it sounds like this will really matter more than ever before now that cultural development is affected by how many provinces follow your culture.

Mechanically totally doable, not something we currently have content for, I'm afraid.

I don't believe we currently have a button for that. I'll raise it internally, though, as I can't think of any reason why we don't.

Regarding the "change culture" mission for the steward: how would that impact melting pots? Say you had a Norman steward changing the culture of an Anglo-Saxon province. Would the province always flip to Norman, or would there be a chance of it becoming English? Or would it always become English?

The change culture task doesn't relate to melting pots, as they're usually a bit more dramatic than that.

Wait... it's completely impossible for a player to have no cultural head since players must be landed, right?

If a player converts to a culture that previously had no cultural head, do they lose technological innovations that they enjoyed from their previous culture? Or do they have to start all over again with 0 innovations?

Yes, a player will always have a cultural head.

Think you might be a touch confused there, pal. Cultures without a head don't have zero innovations, nor do they not make innovations, they simply progress at a slow, but consistent, pace. It's actually marginally above cultures with heads who are utter fools.

What percent of cultures have uniqueinnovations compared to the amount that do not?

Is this like a "the big 8 of the era all have innovations" or "every region has innovations for every period" or "certain countries like France have innovations for every era but some countries like Benin have none for every period"?

I don't think we have relevant stats for that, particularly. I could probably work them out, but it's not really how we add the regional innovations, so you wouldn't be able to get much useful data from it. ^^ Special innovations tend to be added because there was some cool local feature or historical quirk of a culture that we want to model and which doesn't fit inside the standard innovation or faith systems, not because we decided that France needed some arbitrary number of special boosts.

Also, you said that the cultural head is the character of a certain culture that controls most counties of that culture. I guess that means directly and indirectly?

It's calculated via your sub-realm. So, if I'm Duke Geoff the Welshman, and I have Count Stephen the Also Welsh beneath me, I count both my Welsh counties and Stephen's Welsh for the purposes of working out who's the cultural head.

View attachment 579560
Two questions.
Why is the red part Astur-Leonese? I wasn't aware of that area ever being Astur-Leonese... Was it ever?

On the other hand, shouldn't the green part on the county of Braganza be Astur-Leonese? It's actually one of the few areas that remained Astur-Leonese even untill this day.

Very good questions! I have no solid answer for you. I'll raise your issues with the map-domo.

"Creating new culture will be easier" What does it refer to? To meltingpots which we can create in game or in the mods? And will we be able to create melting pots of any cultures?

Ah, sorry for the mix-up: I meant for modding (which I'm pretty excited about), though we do definitely hope to add more melting-pots going forward. They are pre-scripted at present, so you can't just mix any two cultures.

I'm sure this will be one of many posts like this one, but here goes...

Will Dutch be in the German culture group? It's orange (duh!) but historically, especially during the Middle Ages, it was still very much related to Northern German dialects. So much so that they could mutually understand eachother, so it would only make sense they are the same group.

Will French in the finished game be more culturally divided? Right now in the screenshots I see two major culture groups, French and (I think) Occitan. I'm fairly certain it French culture was almost as divided as German. (Think Burgundian, Provencal, Walloon, Francien, Poitevin) Furthermore, is Breton part of French or Celtic(?) culture group?

Lastly, as a Belgian, I'm bothered by the cultural division in what's modern day Belgium.
During the Middle Ages the County of Flanders (that would be Duchy level in CK) geographically situated between the river Schelde and containing the Northern French towns of Lille and Douai was politically part of France, but the culture was very much "Dutch".
Similarly the Duchy of Brabant was also "Dutch" culture and was politically part of Lotharingia, later the Holy Roman Empire. In the screenshot it seems it's indeed partly Germanic culture, however Franconian isn't quite right.

I'm already really hyped to play this game, great job guys.

Dutch is in the Central Germanic culture group, I'm afraid. Not that it didn't have close links to the Scandinavian cultures, just not as close as to Franconian (and, to a much lesser extent, sorta-Saxon). Culture is also not always based on language, even if the judgement is a bit arbitrary and that's the usual baseline: see the Vlachs chumming it up with the South Slavs despite speaking Romance languages which would very determinedly not be mutually-intelligible with Bulgarians, Serbians, and so on.

French will just be Occitan and French at release. A little unfair, I know, but polishing the culture map is one of those tasks that we can keep going at on and on and on forever. Aaaaaaaand, to be honest, probably will. So, as with most other culture fractalising suggestions so far, never say never!

On Brabant & Flanders: I'll have a discussion with some people internally and see if we've got a specific reason for why they are the way they are. Won't promise you anything back, but if it's an oversight, we'll look into it!

Is Sicilian a melting pot? Is Outremer? Do Norse have new melting pots in far off places?

Outremer is a melting pot, Norse does not currently have any new melting pots, but Sicilian, oh boi, Sicilian is a mega-melting pot. Most melting pots take two cultures (our default), but Sicilian takes, maybe, 3-4? 5? I forget the exact number. There's a whole slew of cultures in the region which all merge down into Sicilian. It's a beautiful mess.

Great dev diary, thanks!
Do you mind sharing screenshot of cultures around Kievan Rus / Russia? And interesting whether Russian culture is formable as a melting pot, or splittable.

Ahhh, hugely sorry, but I'm afraid these were all the shots I was cleared to send . Russian is currently static for release, but we'll maybe see in the future!

Is there any grouping of cultures above the cultural group? Something e.g. connecting all Slavs or all Germanic peoples or maybe even Europeans as opposed to the Levant? Is Czech as far away from Swabian as it is from the Tibetan Plateau cultures? Do innovations accepted by a culture have something to do with it, so e.g. if cultures share the same innovations they're considered closer to one another than if they don't?

I'm afraid culture groupings are the top-level in-game. Not that such bonds don't exist, but they're a bit too faint to be worth representing at our level of granularity. There are a few decisions for uniting various pan-culture group cultural blocks, but they're definitely not universally available.

Shared innovations do not currently affect inter-cultural relations. Again, cool in concept, but a bit too niche a relation to share (especially since, over time, the main effect would just be everyone absolutely and irrationally despising anyone determined to stay tribal).

@Wokeg could you offer some insight into the Frisian/Dutch/Flanders situation? As the whole thing seems like a mess currently.

Yeah, it's a thing we've had some some discussion on, basically. There are a lot of dissenting voices whatever camp we pick: I've heard convincing arguments for Frisians, Dutch, and Lower Franconians. YMMV, but personally I feel that Dutch is the best fit (and by that I mean wrong, but least-wrong in most-areas, which seems to be all we can hope for). At the same time, it's not my call and we're still under development, so that may yet change.

 

[SaintDaveUK]

Very nice changes. However, is "Gaelic" a correct term for proto-Scottish? I mean, Irish are also Gaelic. I suppose that "Gaelic" represents the Irish who settled in Scotland (Dal Riata). Maybe Irish split from Gaelic?

It's a good question, we've had a lot of deliberation over what to call the cultures of Scotland and I think there's no perfect solution. We settled on Gaelic and Scots to model the Irish and English speaking dichotomy that existed, as they are commonly-understood terms in the context of modern Scotland and Scottish history. Other candidates like Alban and Inglis were floated, but felt a bit too uncommon and don't quite carry the same connotations.

As @Wokeg says Scotland in 1066 is a really fun start now. The Dunkelds and their lowland pals are poised to begin the historic transformation of Scotland into a Scots-speaking land, while the remnants of Macbeth's dynasty in the highlands have one last chance to wrestle the kingdom of Alba back for the Gaelic culture. The stakes are quite high and it feels of similar significance to the Norman invasion in terms of how it can shift the culture of Scotland.

 

[Wokeg]

Oh hey I thought of a question: has there been any expansion on the concept of realm names changing based on ruler culture (e.g. Ireland vs. Eire, etc.)?

We've got support for it (and it's a fair bit easier to set up now), but we've also toned it down in the base game a little. Especially in the British Isles, you tended to get a bit of a soup of different names changing dramatically as culture shifted, which would be fine if they changed sensibly, but instead they tended to go to a pre-scripted historical alternative that was relevant in the 9th century but less so in the 12th.

Also, are there any plans to introduce, if not a pops system, at least a "minority culture" ( and a minority religion) sometime down the line?

Nothing for release, more than that, I can't say!

That is one of the best dev diary. And I also have a question. So if our cultural leader was raised in a totally foreign region (e.g. We are in Jeruselam but he was raised in France), can he be fascinated by their technology and try to bring them? Or can we as a leader of culture learn something on Hajj or from someone who was a mercenary captain?

Even the leader of culture can arrange a trip to see different cultures, or maybe a commander or a traveler (Marco Polo) we can send

The system is a bit more abstract than that. I'd equate it to, say, trying to live a healthy lifestyle. You don't introduce an innovation to your people by just having a bright idea one day, you introduce it by consistently proliferating and supporting it over time in such a fashion that it becomes an accepted part of daily life. It's not enough to go for one walk, you need to go for regular walks and eat healthily every day for a long period of time. It's not enough to see one exotic curiosity on Hajj, you have to spend ample time and money bringing in exotic foreigners or promoting local traditions and artisans.

What happens with diaspora cultures that have characters, but no counties? For example, will Jewish cultures just be stuck at tribal or will they get some bonus in place of average development?

If you have no cultural head, you progress as though you had a somewhat-dim cultural head. That said, Judaism is a religion with multiple faiths, rather than a culture (though there are some Jewish cultures also).

That's great, but how will you build new culture specific building/units in provinces where a culture hasn't embraced them yet. Let's say I'm Finnish and embraced Greek culture, will my Finnish provinces be able to train cataphracts?

Cataphracts, and all cultural MaA, are men-at-arms, so they're not trained directly by a county. In your scenario, you'd purchase them as normal, and they'd effectively be imports from Greece coming to serve at your court in exchange for their pay. Sort of a reverse-Varangian thing, which is kinda a cool AAR concept.

Is it possible to control, maybe with a Hook, what a cultural leader gets fascinated by? Obviously, I'm talking about cultural leaders you don't control.

Also, can several cultural leaders belong to the same dynasty? I can see that leading to some interesting rivalries and subterfuge.

Not presently, but that's a neat idea!

Providing they're separate cultures, certainly!

Since I cannot find anything about it: what about Volhynian, Ruthenian or other cultures that are bundled as "Russian"? Shouldn't Russian culture be a culture group encompassing smaller cultures but with an event enabling them to more or less merge?

I suspect Russian culture may be an area we re-visit after launch, though I can't promise anything there. For the moment, Russian is just Russian.

@Wokeg One last question: Do the Basque get a cultural fascination that lets them bask in the glory of Absolute Cognatic Succession much earlier than other cultures?

Ab-so-lutely.

This does indeed seem like an odd decision. Why add one small culture only to remove some others.

I also have a suggestion, perhaps Germanic Scottish should be called Scots instead.

Scottish is called Scots in-game.