• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #56 - Cultures and Religions

Steam.jpg

Hello there! My name is Alex and I’m part of the QA team working on Victoria 3! I’m a relatively recent addition to the team, having only joined around March this year. Despite that, it has already been an incredible ride to see the game progress since then! Enough of that though, because today the topic at hand is something you likely have heard a lot about in previous dev diaries but that still deserves its own introduction: Cultures and Religions.

As you probably already know from one of our very first dev diaries, pops have a series of aspects that define and group them. These include where the pops live, what profession they have and what building they work in. On top of that, pops are also defined by their cultural and religious background.

When hovering a culture you get all kinds of data you might find useful, like in this example of the Japanese Pop culture (not to be confused with Japanese pop culture which would much later take the world by storm) tooltip
DD56_1.jpg

Cultures and religions in Victoria 3 are closely related and a central concept of what makes the game work. At their core, both of them work by having a set of traits that define how closely-related different cultures and religions are. These traits are what determine if a culture or religion will be accepted or discriminated against based on the different laws you might have in your country. As an example, both Catholicism and Protestantism have the Christian trait, meaning that they accept each other under the Freedom of Conscience law – which requires a shared trait between the religions - but not under the State Religion law – a law under which only pops of the state religion are accepted. The last alternative is of course the Total Separation law which accepts all religions no matter what traits they have..

The world has many cultures and traditions to get to know and learn more about.
DD56_2.jpg

Cultures work slightly differently. For one, you have descriptive traits such as which language a culture generally speaks, i.e. lusophone or hispanophone. You also have a special kind of trait called heritage which generally describes very broadly where a certain culture originated from geographically. Some laws specifically require cultures to share a heritage with the primary cultures for them to be accepted, such as National Supremacy and Racial Segregation. There’s also Cultural Exclusion which requires at least a single trait to be shared for the culture to be accepted. Finally, Multiculturalism accepts all cultures regardless of traits.

Maybe your ideal run is to achieve prosperity as an independent Greenland where the Inuit culture gets to decide its own destiny.
DD56_3.jpg

Closely tied to cultures and religions are the concepts of taboos and obsessions. Both of these affect, either negatively or positively, how much Pops are willing to pay for and consume certain goods. As such, both taboos and obsessions only apply to consumer goods as opposed to military or industrial goods (so no tank obsessions, sorry). Obsessions are tied to cultures, for instance the French culture being obsessed with wine or the Nepali with tea. As you might have guessed, taboos on the other hand are tied to religions. Importantly though, they still manifest themselves culturally. Every culture has a religion tied to it and “inherits” the taboos from that religion. This means that a catholic turkish pop will still have a taboo against wine and liquor for instance.

The Nepali know Tea is the superior hot drink and not that bitter bean juice people call coffee.
DD56_4.jpg

Another difference between obsessions and taboos is that while taboos don’t change throughout the game, obsessions are more fleeting and can emerge organically or be removed in case something significant happens, like the Opium Crisis for instance. If a certain good is abundantly available in a market, the Pops in that market have a small chance of becoming obsessed with it.

A prominent leader of the Comanche, Puhihwitsikwasu, or Iron Jacket for the uncultured Europeans, gets some impressive culturally defined clothes and headdress.
DD56_5.jpg

Cultures and religions touch on most of the game’s mechanics in one way or another as can be seen from previous dev diaries. From mechanics related to secessions, migrations and unifications all the way to discrimination, political strength and conversion/assimilation. Cultures are also tied to visual changes such as the appearance of characters. When playing Victoria 3, you will often be thinking about cultures in one way or another.

On top of all that, it might interest some of you that cultures and religions are very easily moddable to do what you want. Below you can find a quick Blorg culture mod I made with some details like localization files omitted. All in all a very simple process!

I’m fully expecting someone to make a “Blorg invasion from Outer Space” total conversion alt history mod now.
DD56_6.jpg

As you can see, the modding itself is very simple, even though I glossed over a few details like localization files and properly defining cultural traits as well as actually creating a Pop with the Blorg culture, but all of that is very straight forward.

DD56_7.jpg


DD56_8.jpg

That’s all for me folks! Exciting times are ahead of us and I’m looking forward to having you all play the game when it’s finally time. Until then maybe I’ll see you at our first upcoming stream next week or maybe even at PDXCON? Either way, next time Mikael will tell you a bit more about The Journey so Far!
 
  • 147Like
  • 32
  • 30Love
  • 18
  • 3
Reactions:
This comment is reserved by the Community Team for gathering Dev Responses in, for ease of reading.

Clarification on the cultural mapmode: this map displays the dominant culture among those who consider that state their Homeland, and does not represent cultural control, international understanding, "natural borders", or anything like that. States can be considered Homelands by multiple cultures simultaneously and this map will shift over time as the game progresses.

Clarification to the clarification on the cultural mapmode: it's a Homelands mapmode, which is in this context more relevant gameplay information than "which culture has a plurality here". In the cases where a state is a Homeland for multiple cultures we break ties by population and display the minority cultures in the tooltip.


aantia said:


Thanks for the DD, it was short but useful.
One question: can a culture have more than one Heritage? E.g. you might say that the Lebanese, standing as they do between East and West, should have both European and Arabic Heritages. Or the Manchu might have both Chinese and Steppe Nomad Heritages.
Thanks for pointing out the grammar issues :) We're constantly making changes and fixing small stuff like that. To your question though: A culture can have more than one heritage, yes. It's just not very common. For instance Sephardim have both European and Middle-Eastern heritages.


Chickenhawk said:


understood that taboos are 'sticky' but is there a mechanism through modding to change them?

IE: could someone write an event that changes a culture's (or cultures') taboos?
Currently it's not possible to change taboos mid-game even through events (as opposed to doing it before the game by editing the religion definition), mainly because it's not something we do in any of our events. It should be fairly simple to add it at some point for mods though if the interest is there even if we don't use it in the main game.


Pl4t0n1c said:


Will atheism be represented in-game?

For mechanical reasons of discrimination/taboo/etc I understand the need to categorize all pops by a specific religion--it doesn't function the same as other religions (can one inherit atheism?) but might be pertinent re: communist/anarchist mechanics.
Atheism is not currently represented in the game, no. It's an interesting idea we might get back to in the future. For now, the closest we have are secular laws and ideologies which attempt to separate state and church.


BrotherJonathan said:


Will this system by dynamic (i.e. will it allow for some cultures to disappear and for new ones to appear, or for cultures to hybridize over time)?
Given the time frame of the game it doesn't really make as much sense for that kind of mechanic as it does in say CK3, so no, cultures are generally static with the exception of obsessions which can emerge over time.


Al-Khalidi said:


So what are those Traits? They seem a bit irregular (one is Yamato, other is Himalayan, we have seen couple of different others). Could you show more examples? I wonder if there are any cultural traits that would make for example Albanians tolerated in Ottoman Empire.
Traits can be all kinds of things. Some are about languages like lusophone or anglophone, others are about more specific geographical conditions like Himalayan as you mentioned and others represent groups of cultures with shared characteristics such as a Jewish group or Polynesian group.

For Albanian it will depend on what laws the Ottoman Empire is using, Albanian doesn't share any trait with Turkish, so they would only be accepted under the Multiculturalism law.


Al-Khalidi said:


Do different religions give different bonuses for devouts? Is it still a thing? Or only thing that differentiates religions are taboos?
Religions do not give different "bonuses" or so. Their differences are the taboos and how different religions are discriminated against under different laws.


King Anund said:


Nice. I suppose that Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician share a trait so that under National Supremacy all would have voting rights in Spain as it was the case historically.
They do! They all have the Iberian trait. On top of that Spanish has hispanophone and Galician has lusophone.


Dimo87 said:


There's a livestream of Victoria 3 next week!? Can you tell us where and when we can see it?
Indeed! On the 30th at 16:00 CEST we will have our first stream of the game :)


FranklyJustNess said:


Kinda hoped for some information on how Devout IG varies by religions. Do they have different bonuses, different preferences for laws, etc. Outside discrimination mechanic and taboos, we've not heard much about religions in the game.
The modifiers an IG gives based on if they approve of your government or not are not dependant on which religion they represent. What can change is what ideologies they have, but that is done more on a case by case basis depending on local specifics. As an example the Buddhist Monks IG will have a specific ideology set to them which the Catholic church does not have.


Willem IV said:


Can the religion tied to a culture change during the course of the game?
The religion tied to a culture does not change, no. Do note this does not mean you can't have pops with a religion different from it though. So even though you can have culturally French pops of all different religions, it will always be tied to Catholicism.


Jorlaan said:


Could we mod a military good to be an obsession?
You can set a military good as an obsession through the culture definitions, yes. It just won't do anything as obsessions are about pop consumption and pops don't consume military goods. So it would just be a visual thing.


Karl I said:


Why is bosnia all serbian? What about the Bosniaks and croats ?
It is not! The map shows the majority population in the state, and for Bosnia the Serbs are quite numerous even though the have barely any political strength in the Ottoman empire compared to the Bosniaks.


Jamaican Castle said:


So taboos can't be added or removed by, say, Prohibition?
They can't. The prohibition and the opium ban are handled in a different way through modifiers to production and trade routes rather than affecting what the pops actually want to consume.


Faarenough said:


Why is Tasmania not a separate colony in 1836?
It is! Called Van Dieman's Land,


Aozora Kasuga said:


A question for modding. We have seen that there is a term of religion in culture defination. How does it work? can there be two more religions? Such as Japannse culture believe Mahayana and Shinto at the same time.
Each culture can only have one religion it is tied to. Apart from that pops can be of any religion of course.


Earmuffs said:


Yet again New Zealand has been left off the world map.
It's fine, I see how it is Paradox...
Hey, gotta cross off "get on /r/MapsWithoutNZ" from my bucket list.


Creamu said:


Doesnt look like anything is being answered the dev diary, but one thing I would love to know:

Can cultures have cultural traits added to them as the game progresses? Would be cool especially for longer games where you might go beyond 1936 that if France subjugates a culture for long enough that they would eventually start speaking French and adopt the Francophone trait.

At the very least I would bet a modder could figure it out.
Sorry for the delay with the answers! Have been quite busy, so only got to it now. Cultures can't have traits added to them throughout the game, no. Largely this is due to the time frame of the game being fairly short in the grand scheme of things, so it wouldn't make as much sense to have cultures change drastically like that. It could be something we could look into adding for modders in the future if there is an interest though.







Fulbert said:


What about Muslim German pops then? Will they still have no taboo against wine?
Correct. They'll only have taboos from the religion tied to their culture.

famaouz said:


That is strange, Albanians were viewed quite favourably in Ottoman administrations. A lot of Ottoman's viziers were Albanians. Heck, even Muhammad Ali himself was Albanian. There should be shared trait(s) between Albanians and Turks so that Albanian is accepted in Ottoman Empire...
That is a fair point. Do you have a suggestion for some kind of "trait" they could share that would make sense?

anbory said:


So what about North Caucasian culture? North Caucasian peoples are both Orthodox and Muslim. What religion they should been tied to? As I suggested before, maybe it's better to separate North Caucasian into Muslim Dagestani and Nakhs and Orthodox Adyge cultures? The current setup in North Caucasus just make no sense.
North Caucasian is currently tied to Sunni. Again, this does not mean North Caucasian pops can't have other religions though.

Byamarro said:


Do cultures impact the technology spread? I'd imagine that two countries having majority of population speaking the same language or sharing some cultural understandings would communicate more and lead to better ideas spread.
Tech spread is not affected by cultures, no.

$ilent_$trider said:


New Zealand, just like Neverland and Acre (not that one, the other one) are fictitious places and everyone knows it.
Hey, Acre is a real place! I once saw a car claiming to be from Rio Branco - AC. Felt like a dream!
 
  • 9Like
  • 6
  • 3
  • 1
Reactions:
Hello there! My name is Alex and I’m part of the QA team working on Victoria 3! I’m a relatively recent addition to the team, having only joined around March this year. Despite that, it has already been an incredible ride to see the game progress since then! Enough of that though, because today the topic at hand is something you likely have heard a lot about in previous dev diaries but that still deserves its own introduction: Cultures and Religions.

As you probably already know from one of our very first dev diaries, pops have a series of aspects that define and group them. These include where the pops live, what profession they have and what building they work in. On top of that, pops are also defined by their cultural and religious background.

When hovering a culture you get all kinds of data you might find useful, like in this example of the Japanese Pop culture (not to be confused with Japanese pop culture which would much later take the world by storm) tooltip
View attachment 870644
Cultures and religions in Victoria 3 are closely related and a central concept of what makes the game work. At their core, both of them work by having a set of traits that define how closely-related different cultures and religions are. These traits are what determine if a culture or religion will be accepted or discriminated against based on the different laws you might have in your country. As an example, both Catholicism and Protestantism have the Christian trait, meaning that they accept each other under the Freedom of Conscience law – which requires a shared trait between the religions - but not under the State Religion law – a law under which only pops of the state religion are accepted. The last alternative is of course the Total Separation law which accepts all religions no matter what traits they have..

The world has many cultures and traditions to get to know and learn more about.
View attachment 870645
Cultures work slightly differently. For one, you have descriptive traits such as which language a culture generally speaks, i.e. lusophone or hispanophone. You also have a special kind of trait called heritage which generally describes very broadly where a certain culture originated from geographically. Some laws specifically require cultures to share a heritage with the primary cultures for them to be accepted, such as National Supremacy and Racial Segregation. There’s also Cultural Exclusion which requires at least a single trait to be shared for the culture to be accepted. Finally, Multiculturalism accepts all cultures regardless of traits.

Maybe your ideal run is to achieve prosperity as an independent Greenland where the Inuit culture gets to decide its own destiny.
View attachment 870646
Closely tied to cultures and religions are the concepts of taboos and obsessions. Both of these affect, either negatively or positively, how much Pops are willing to pay for and consume certain goods. As such, both taboos and obsessions only apply to consumer goods as opposed to military or industrial goods (so no tank obsessions, sorry). Obsessions are tied to cultures, for instance the French culture being obsessed with wine or the Nepali with tea. As you might have guessed, taboos on the other hand are tied to religions. Importantly though, they still manifest themselves culturally. Every culture has a religion tied to it and “inherits” the taboos from that religion. This means that a catholic turkish pop will still have a taboo against wine and liquor for instance.

The Nepali know Tea is the superior hot drink and not that bitter bean juice people call coffee.
View attachment 870649
Another difference between obsessions and taboos is that while taboos don’t change throughout the game, obsessions are more fleeting and can emerge organically or be removed in case something significant happens, like the Opium Crisis for instance. If a certain good is abundantly available in a market, the Pops in that market have a small chance of becoming obsessed with it.

A prominent leader of the Comanche, Puhihwitsikwasu, or Iron Jacket for the uncultured Europeans, gets some impressive culturally defined clothes and headdress.
View attachment 870650
Cultures and religions touch on most of the game’s mechanics in one way or another as can be seen from previous dev diaries. From mechanics related to secessions, migrations and unifications all the way to discrimination, political strength and conversion/assimilation. Cultures are also tied to visual changes such as the appearance of characters. When playing Victoria 3, you will often be thinking about cultures in one way or another.

On top of all that, it might interest some of you that cultures and religions are very easily moddable to do what you want. Below you can find a quick Blorg culture mod I made with some details like localization files omitted. All in all a very simple process!

I’m fully expecting someone to make a “Blorg invasion from Outer Space” total conversion alt history mod now.
View attachment 870651
As you can see, the modding itself is very simple, even though I glossed over a few details like localization files and properly defining cultural traits as well as actually creating a Pop with the Blorg culture, but all of that is very straight forward.

That’s all for me folks! Exciting times are ahead of us and I’m looking forward to having you all play the game when it’s finally time. Until then maybe I’ll see you at our first upcoming stream next week or maybe even at PDXCON? Either way, next time Mikael will tell you a bit more about The Journey so Far!
So what are those Traits? They seem a bit irregular (one is Yamato, other is Himalayan, we have seen couple of different others). Could you show more examples? I wonder if there are any cultural traits that would make for example Albanians tolerated in Ottoman Empire.
 
  • 4
Reactions:
I really love it. Thank you.

But I would like request to consider splitting up the german cultures a bit more. Austrian should be distinct from South German.
 
  • 39
  • 4Like
  • 3
Reactions:
Hello there! My name is Alex and I’m part of the QA team working on Victoria 3! I’m a relatively recent addition to the team, having only joined around March this year. Despite that, it has already been an incredible ride to see the game progress since then! Enough of that though, because today the topic at hand is something you likely have heard a lot about in previous dev diaries but that still deserves its own introduction: Cultures and Religions.

As you probably already know from one of our very first dev diaries, pops have a series of aspects that define and group them. These include where the pops live, what profession they have and what building they work in. On top of that, pops are also defined by their cultural and religious background.

When hovering a culture you get all kinds of data you might find useful, like in this example of the Japanese Pop culture (not to be confused with Japanese pop culture which would much later take the world by storm) tooltip
View attachment 870644
Cultures and religions in Victoria 3 are closely related and a central concept of what makes the game work. At their core, both of them work by having a set of traits that define how closely-related different cultures and religions are. These traits are what determine if a culture or religion will be accepted or discriminated against based on the different laws you might have in your country. As an example, both Catholicism and Protestantism have the Christian trait, meaning that they accept each other under the Freedom of Conscience law – which requires a shared trait between the religions - but not under the State Religion law – a law under which only pops of the state religion are accepted. The last alternative is of course the Total Separation law which accepts all religions no matter what traits they have..

The world has many cultures and traditions to get to know and learn more about.
View attachment 870645
Cultures work slightly differently. For one, you have descriptive traits such as which language a culture generally speaks, i.e. lusophone or hispanophone. You also have a special kind of trait called heritage which generally describes very broadly where a certain culture originated from geographically. Some laws specifically require cultures to share a heritage with the primary cultures for them to be accepted, such as National Supremacy and Racial Segregation. There’s also Cultural Exclusion which requires at least a single trait to be shared for the culture to be accepted. Finally, Multiculturalism accepts all cultures regardless of traits.

Maybe your ideal run is to achieve prosperity as an independent Greenland where the Inuit culture gets to decide its own destiny.
View attachment 870646
Closely tied to cultures and religions are the concepts of taboos and obsessions. Both of these affect, either negatively or positively, how much Pops are willing to pay for and consume certain goods. As such, both taboos and obsessions only apply to consumer goods as opposed to military or industrial goods (so no tank obsessions, sorry). Obsessions are tied to cultures, for instance the French culture being obsessed with wine or the Nepali with tea. As you might have guessed, taboos on the other hand are tied to religions. Importantly though, they still manifest themselves culturally. Every culture has a religion tied to it and “inherits” the taboos from that religion. This means that a catholic turkish pop will still have a taboo against wine and liquor for instance.

The Nepali know Tea is the superior hot drink and not that bitter bean juice people call coffee.
View attachment 870649
Another difference between obsessions and taboos is that while taboos don’t change throughout the game, obsessions are more fleeting and can emerge organically or be removed in case something significant happens, like the Opium Crisis for instance. If a certain good is abundantly available in a market, the Pops in that market have a small chance of becoming obsessed with it.

A prominent leader of the Comanche, Puhihwitsikwasu, or Iron Jacket for the uncultured Europeans, gets some impressive culturally defined clothes and headdress.
View attachment 870650
Cultures and religions touch on most of the game’s mechanics in one way or another as can be seen from previous dev diaries. From mechanics related to secessions, migrations and unifications all the way to discrimination, political strength and conversion/assimilation. Cultures are also tied to visual changes such as the appearance of characters. When playing Victoria 3, you will often be thinking about cultures in one way or another.

On top of all that, it might interest some of you that cultures and religions are very easily moddable to do what you want. Below you can find a quick Blorg culture mod I made with some details like localization files omitted. All in all a very simple process!

I’m fully expecting someone to make a “Blorg invasion from Outer Space” total conversion alt history mod now.
View attachment 870651
As you can see, the modding itself is very simple, even though I glossed over a few details like localization files and properly defining cultural traits as well as actually creating a Pop with the Blorg culture, but all of that is very straight forward.

That’s all for me folks! Exciting times are ahead of us and I’m looking forward to having you all play the game when it’s finally time. Until then maybe I’ll see you at our first upcoming stream next week or maybe even at PDXCON? Either way, next time Mikael will tell you a bit more about The Journey so Far!
Do different religions give different bonuses for devouts? Is it still a thing? Or only thing that differentiates religions are taboos?
 
  • 7
  • 1Like
Reactions:
I have a few critisisms about the cultrual portrayal of the map, and in general I do think a lot of stuff is either oversimplified or downright wrong, but I dont want to be too negative, so I wont tire you with all that. One request I would like to make is to provide either stripes or some other sort of indication for a strong minority culture in the region; It would help a lot with making the culture map fell more alive and vibrant and show a lot more granularity than the current map provides
 
  • 90Like
  • 13
  • 2
  • 1
Reactions:
I think “Min” and “Yue” should be Han Chinese. If Min and Yue are being included as dialects, there are many others that could be included ie. Hakka, Xiang, Gan, Wu, Jin, etc. it’s a bit weird that only Yue and Min are included but the rest are excluded. That goes the same with minority ethnic groups ie. Miao, Zhang, etc.

Edit: for those disagreeing, I am a speaker of a “Min Chinese” dialect (Taiwanese) and we consider ourselves Han Chinese, same with Yue (Cantonese) people.
 
Last edited:
  • 21Like
  • 6
  • 2
Reactions:
I wonder if there's currently a way of creating a state which tries to enforce its culture and convert people to it. From what I've seen pops only assimilate into a culture when accepted. Does that mean a fully accepting society will have exact same rate of assimilation as more oppressive one with national supremacy, for example? I just feel like it's not really possible to create an authoritarian nation that works towards assimilating conquered people... outside spamming heritage edict everywhere.
 
  • 8Like
Reactions: