Base culture vs settlement culture

[Andrei Gijgorev]

Not sure if this is a bug or if there's someting I'm doing wrong. I was testing the automatic culture conversion of colonial cities and couldn't get it to work. For the test, I used the vanilla 1492 scenario with some minor changes:

• Set the population of Granada (ID #444) to 3000 (less than _PROV_CITY_POP_).
• Set the culture of Granada to italian in 1492.inc (still berber in provinces.txt).
• Set culture_change to yes for Europe in geography.txt.

Then I annexed Granada as Spain. Since Granada is a national core with a province culture (italian) different from the base culture (berber) and a colonial city (pop < 5000) the province culture should immediately change to my primary culture (iberian), but this didn't happen. Bug, or did I miss something?

There's also the issue that when colonies are destroyed by natives the province culture isn't reset. A simple fix would be to reset the culture to the one found in provinces.txt when a settlement is removed; the problem with this is that any changes in the scenario file from provinces.txt (native migration etc.) would still be reverted. A better solution would be to keep track of both the native culture and the settlement culture in save files (but still check against provinces.txt for culture change).

 

[MichaelM]

Europe is set to culture_change = no in geography.txt, so Granada will not flip. Tangiers would, though.

 

[Andrei Gijgorev]

I did change that value:

• Set the population of Granada (ID #444) to 3000 (less than _PROV_CITY_POP_).
• Set the culture of Granada to italian in 1492.inc (still berber in provinces.txt).
• Set culture_change to yes for Europe in geography.txt.

I tried it with a couple of other provinces in Africa (in case the culture_change value wasn't read or something) but got the same result.

Then I tried it with other countries instead, and suddenly all the modified provinces changed culture a month after being ceded. After experimenting with sliders and religions I figured out that the reason why these provinces didn't convert for Spain was that I had set their culture to Italian, and apparently Spain has Italian as an accepted culture in 1492. So I removed Italian from Spain's cultures list, and everything worked as intended.

Except not everything. If I gave Granada another province, and then fired an event for them to cede the province of Granada to Spain, that province would change culture from Italian to Iberian at the start of next month. However if I annexed Granada by hand then the province would not change culture. I compared the savegames and found that a nationalism entry was created when Granada was annexed, but not when the province was ceded by event. So apparently when determining whether to change culture, the game only checks whether the nationalism date is longer than _PROV_NATIONALISM_MIN_MONTHS_ + _PROV_NATIONALISM_MEDIUM_MONTHS_ + _PROV_NATIONALISM_MAX_MONTHS_ in the past, without consideration of national cores.

So there are three issues here:

• Provinces never convert from accepted to primary cultures.
  I guess this may be WAD; however it is not mentioned on the EU2 wiki and I doubt the mechanic has changed in FtG. I'm also not sure that it makes a whole lot of sense for a province to convert to the state culture from a culture that is (presumably) very different, but not from one that is (presumably) rather similar.
  
  
• National cores are ignored when checking whether nationalism exists.
  This is probably not WAD. According to the wiki: However, when a country gains ownership of one of its core provinces, nationalism ends immediately (and the culture changes if other conditions apply).
  
  
• There's no nationalism in provinces ceded by event.
  This has always been the case, and usually it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn't though, especially in the context of culture change. My proposal would be to add a "when = x" parameter to the cedeprovince command with x ranging from 0 (default, no nationalism) to 3 (max nationalism). The nationalism date would then be calculated from the respective durations in defines.txt.

Culture change also isn't really thought-out in regards to religion. If Spain conquers a Chinese colonial city and waits out nationalism then the culture will change to Iberian, but those "Iberians" will remain Buddhist. I can't really think of something that will magically fix this, but in my opinion at the very least culture change in provinces with a religion that is either in a different group or currently listed in religious_enemies should be prohibited until converted first.

 

[MichaelM]

I did change that value:

OK, I missed that line.

I tried it with a couple of other provinces in Africa (in case the culture_change value wasn't read or something) but got the same result.

Then I tried it with other countries instead, and suddenly all the modified provinces changed culture a month after being ceded. After experimenting with sliders and religions I figured out that the reason why these provinces didn't convert for Spain was that I had set their culture to Italian, and apparently Spain has Italian as an accepted culture in 1492. So I removed Italian from Spain's cultures list, and everything worked as intended.

Except not everything. If I gave Granada another province, and then fired an event for them to cede the province of Granada to Spain, that province would change culture from Italian to Iberian at the start of next month. However if I annexed Granada by hand then the province would not change culture. I compared the savegames and found that a nationalism entry was created when Granada was annexed, but not when the province was ceded by event. So apparently when determining whether to change culture, the game only checks whether the nationalism date is longer than _PROV_NATIONALISM_MIN_MONTHS_ + _PROV_NATIONALISM_MEDIUM_MONTHS_ + _PROV_NATIONALISM_MAX_MONTHS_ in the past, without consideration of national cores.

Correct.

So there are three issues here:

• Provinces never convert from accepted to primary cultures.
  I guess this may be WAD; however it is not mentioned on the EU2 wiki and I doubt the mechanic has changed in FtG. I'm also not sure that it makes a whole lot of sense for a province to convert to the state culture from a culture that is (presumably) very different, but not from one that is (presumably) rather similar.

Correct, this is unchanged.

• National cores are ignored when checking whether nationalism exists.
  This is probably not WAD. According to the wiki: However, when a country gains ownership of one of its core provinces, nationalism ends immediately (and the culture changes if other conditions apply).

This is also unchanged, and I'm not sure whether instant culture change on annexation is a desirable outcome. Regardless, this whole mechanic is completely invisible in game until it actually happens, and then there's no explanation why it happened. That should change.

• There's no nationalism in provinces ceded by event.
  This has always been the case, and usually it makes sense. Sometimes it doesn't though, especially in the context of culture change. My proposal would be to add a "when = x" parameter to the cedeprovince command with x ranging from 0 (default, no nationalism) to 3 (max nationalism). The nationalism date would then be calculated from the respective durations in defines.txt.

That's reasonable.

Culture change also isn't really thought-out in regards to religion. If Spain conquers a Chinese colonial city and waits out nationalism then the culture will change to Iberian, but those "Iberians" will remain Buddhist. I can't really think of something that will magically fix this, but in my opinion at the very least culture change in provinces with a religion that is either in a different group or currently listed in religious_enemies should be prohibited until converted first.

Possibly. Converting wrong-culture provinces is already difficult enough that I'm not sure I would like to go that direction.

 

[Andrei Gijgorev]

Converting wrong-culture provinces is already difficult enough that I'm not sure I would like to go that direction.

I'm not sure whether instant culture change on annexation is a desirable outcome. Regardless, this whole mechanic is completely invisible in game until it actually happens, and then there's no explanation why it happened. That should change.

That's a good point. The entire culture/religion aspect of EU2 is very difficult to fix since every province is simplified as being 100% homogenous, but here's an attempt at a simple solution that doesn't change gameplay too much:

• National cores remove nationalism completely only for provinces with the primary country culture. For provinces with an accepted culture or with a population below the _PROV_CITY_POP_ threshold, nationalism will be set to the lowest level (1% revoltrisk, 10 years). For all other provinces, it will be set to the medium level (2% revoltrisk, 20 years).
• Culture can change from any other culture, including accepted cultures.
• Culture change in provinces with a religion in a different group or currently listed in religious_enemies is prohibited.
• The wrong-culture conversion penalty doesn't apply to provinces below the _PROV_CITY_POP_ threshold (or is proportional to the population).
• There's a popup message when a province changes culture, analogous to successful religious conversion.

Optionally, the cedeprovince logic could default to considering the province a national core for determining nationalism, i.e. accepted cultures and colonies get 1% revoltrisk while foreign-culture provinces get 2%.

With this system, no province will change culture immediately, culture change takes religion into account, and conversion in colonies is made easier.