Better POP assimilation

[BonSequitur]

I've been asking for this in stray threads for a while, and I think it deserves its own thread. Basically, the current way POPs assimilate, rather than attempting to simulate the period, mostly works to 'clean up' stray POPs, and reduce the overall number of POPs (That is, the number of distinct POPs, not the number of workers) in the game. This is a performance and game play feature that I thoroughly support.

However, the way it currently works has some unpleasant side-effects; POPs rapidly assimilate to the national culture, causing aberrations later in the game. India is full of Englishmen, Czechoslovakia and Lombardia are full of Germans, and Norway is full of Swedes. This becomes remarkably bad when one of those nations is liberated - suddenly, Bohemia-Moravia is independent, but inhabited entirely by Germans! There is a better way to model assimilation, without negatively impacting performance.

• Each province has its own 'local culture.' The local culture is the culture of the largest POP of any kind in the province. This can be determined on the fly or updated periodically, for performance's sake.
• POPs assimilate into the local culture.
• National culture POPs in overseas states and colonies never assimilate.

This fixes most of the aberrations, and might even result in a slight gain in performance. Under the current system, the mass of Italians in the Veneto will assimilate into tiny Austrian migrant POPs - but the Italians won't be gone because they are initially so large compared to the Austrians. Thus, you get both an ahistorical outcome, an unhelpful gameplay event, and no performance gain whatsoever. Under this system, Austrians in the Veneto would assimilate into the broader Italian population. Likewise, Yankees in the South would become Dixie, North Germans in Bavaria would become South Germans, and so on and so forth; since those POPs are smaller, they would assimilate completely as soon as migration ended. The oppressed cultures of Europe are saved, gameplay is improved, and because you no longer have huge POPs assimilating into tiny ones, performance is better.

 

[Archimbaud]

It's difficult to imagine that the primary culture of a country would disappear totally from a colony or a conquered state.
What I could imagine is that the primary culture acts as an accepted culture in the provinces where it's not the dominant culture.
This way, it wouldn't be assimilated nor would it assimilate in such provinces.

 

[Rabid]

I think this is an interesting idea, allowing for the high assimilation rates which are apparently required to keep performance up while simultaneously making immigration and assimilation in colonies much more believable. It's not foolproof (the jews will still disappear from Europe) but it's a decent fix.

 

[Planck]

If somehow less aggressive POP assimilation is introduced, I think there should be possibilities for those who want to focus on assimilating newly acquired territories for roleplaying purposes, for example. More or less as in EU3:Httt, where you get a Settlement Policy provincial decision, but in V2 as a National Focus or something.

That way, you won't have all states as your primary culture, but if you want to focus on assimilation, you'll get that option too (at the expense of other options).

 

[yendis]

I personally like the way they've done cultural assimilation. I think of it not necessarily as "white englishmen that have moved to India," but more like Indians that have adopted British cultural norms.

It makes sense to me that colonies could/would eventually start taking on the cultural norms of their mother country.

 

[unmerged(219464)]

This is a silly idea in that California would always remain mexican, other states native american etc etc. Yankees would barely get any population etc. Colonial emigration would become pointless and you would actually lose primary culture which is not something you want to do.

 

[unmerged(219464)]

also there would be no states bc you could never get 1% of primary culture crats in any colonies.

 

[Cinéad IV]

All we really need is less immigration, and less assimilation. It was more accurate in Vicky 1, barring the obscene directions that immigration sometimes took (50 million strong California by 1900, for example.)

On the other hand, not having assimilation slows the game down by making the computer calculate needs for thousands more POPs. It's one of those things that only people with pretty fast computers will really be able to improve, I'm guessing. I can't see Paradox introducing such an ahistorical feature if they didn't think it was absolutely neccessary.

 

[Mnoracle]

First of all the real melting pot is North and South America it's main destination for Immigrants and really multicultural.

So the simplest and the best solution is just seriously reduce assimilation in non Americas and it will do fine.

 

[unmerged(61066)]

• Each province has its own 'local culture.' The local culture is the culture of the largest POP of any kind in the province. This can be determined on the fly or updated periodically, for performance's sake.
• POPs assimilate into the local culture.
• National culture POPs in overseas states and colonies never assimilate.

There would be an even simpler way to alter the assimilation. We would just need a variable with it would be possible to compare the size/percentage of the pops to each other. So then it would be possible to create a rule that the local cultural majorities won't assimilate and there should be no assimilation if the state culture pops are less than (for example) 20% in the given province. This would basically solve the assimilation problem.
As for the religious conversion : this should be completely disabled by default, but there should be a national focus to convert a state's non-state religion pops which would create the necessary pops and then there would be a conversion for some militancy in exchange.. I think to mod this is possible, just the assimilation method lacks the variable type.

 

[de Rens]

For both a balance of performance and minimal historicity, make it that pops that migrate are assimilated. 100% of the time. All the time. California would keep its Mexican pop. But it would eventually be submerged by all the newly arrived pops who would all be yankee. And India and Ireland wouldn't suddenly become 87% Brittish.

It's not a perfect solution. But it would prevent the performance issues in late game and would end up reflecting reality much better then the current system.

 

[BonSequitur]

This is a silly idea in that California would always remain mexican, other states native american etc etc. Yankees would barely get any population etc. Colonial emigration would become pointless and you would actually lose primary culture which is not something you want to do.

Those states are pretty sparsely populated at game start; colonial migration from Yankees should make them the majority there fairly soon, and then the local POPs would assimilate into the Yankees.

California today doesn't speak English because people saw the American flag get hoisted up the town halls and decided they had to learn it, it speaks English because of masses of English-speaking Americans came to it.

The major problem here is gameplay. What happens when e.g., Ireland or Czechoslovakia free themselves, and then find that most of their population is culturally alien to the new government?

 

[Mnoracle]

Here is my changes:

	group = {
		modifier = {
			factor = -0.2
			country = { citizenship_policy = residency } 
		}
		modifier = {
			factor = 0.15
			country = { citizenship_policy = full_citizenship }
		}
	}

	modifier = {
		factor = -0.5
		NOT = {
			OR = {
				continent = north_america
				continent = south_america
			}
		}
	}

Plus I changed
ASSIMILATION_SCALE = 0.002, -- 0.005
in defines.lua

From several games I noticed that assimilation became a lot more natural.

Still it does not change problem with huge immigration But that's another issue.

 

[BonSequitur]

Sadly there is no way to change the assimilation target through modding, is there?

 

[King]

Sadly there is no way to change the assimilation target through modding, is there?

There is no way to do that at this time. It picks which ever of your primary or accepted cultures are present in the province in the largest numbers and assimilated to that. This does create oddities like British POPs assimilating to Afro-American, ont he other hand it does mean that immigrants to the South become Dixie instead of seeing a majority Yankee population by 1860, which was known to happen in Victoria.

If we go back to the idea of defining cultures for provinces. This was considered during development. We felt it would be a cool way to do things like create a distinct Austrialian culture by having POPs that move there seek to assimilate to that culture. However, it was rejected on perfromance grounds because it would add yet more CPU work to the assimilation logic. On top of that it would add yet more memory requirements to the province database. Now there will be those that argue that this would pretty minor in the grand scheme of things and this is probably true. Still we were determined to avoid feature creep. Once you add one small thing, then another and then another you end up with a huge perfromance overhead.

I do understand your problem and yes I know the game would feel better if we did do something about it. My prefered solution at this time is to see if I can beg some programming time to investigate further optimisations and then see if the assimilate rate can then be toned down and still keep up a reasonable level of perfromance.

 

[InnocentIII]

If all they're trying to do is clean up stray Pops, I'd rather have this done directly rather than through changing the assimilation model of the entire game.

I think there ought to be a periodic (maybe end of year) clean up. Have the game count up the number of Pops there are, figure out how many there ought to be, and merge the exliminated Pops into an appropriate Pop in the same province according to the proportion already there. Example: a 600 person farmer Pop will be eliminated in a province with 5000 accepted culture pops and 10,000 natives, 200 would be added to the accepted culture, 400 to the natives. You'd keep one Pop of each occupation to avoid "forming" Clerks, say, and having them eliminated every year.

Hopefully, something like this could clean up Pops without making Bohemia 100% German or India 50% British in a few decades.

 

[King]

If all they're trying to do is clean up stray Pops, I'd rather have this done directly rather than through changing the assimilation model of the entire game.

I think there ought to be a periodic (maybe end of year) clean up. Have the game count up the number of Pops there are, figure out how many there ought to be, and merge the exliminated Pops into an appropriate Pop in the same province according to the proportion already there. Example: a 600 person farmer Pop will be eliminated in a province with 5000 accepted culture pops and 10,000 natives, 200 would be added to the accepted culture, 400 to the natives. You'd keep one Pop of each occupation to avoid "forming" Clerks, say, and having them eliminated every year.

Something like this would clean up Pops without making Bohemia 100% German or India 50% British in a few decades.

You'd be surprised actually. The game cycles through evey POP every day to update them and this includes immigration. So we are doing that anyway. Adding additional end of year checks can create an end of year hang. The EU series of games can get pretty bad for that. Knowing that this could be a problem we shyed away from it.

 

[unmerged(48800)]

About assimilation and such, I have seen that only in America and overseas teritory one can enact inmigration NF, that´s great, but there is another thing with assimilattion. For American Nations European Inmigration must be like an accepted culture, or better assimilatte.

For Countries in SXIX that encourages inm european inm was´t a problem, it was almost inverse, while not as good as national culture they where by far more accepted (and perform higher offices) than ¨local¨ unaccepted as native americans or african minor.

I siggest to change to an intermediatte culture between accepted and unaccepted, perhaps ¨welcome inmigrant¨ wich assimilates twice as fast and have 50% of the penalties of unaccepted (including leaderchip and research)

Examples are The German officers recruited by Brazil, Many technicians (clercks) bringed to argentina, french and North american teachers etc, all where highly accepted as well as artisans and farmers (where the goverment even gave them lands for free).

 

[BonSequitur]

I do understand your problem and yes I know the game would feel better if we did do something about it. My prefered solution at this time is to see if I can beg some programming time to investigate further optimisations and then see if the assimilate rate can then be toned down and still keep up a reasonable level of perfromance.

I totally understand the performance issue, and I think it's a gameplay issue too - having three dozen pops of each time in a province of the same kind is annoying for players. My one significant problem with this is that you end up with Italy, Bohemia, Poland and Ireland being culturally annihilated. A quick and dirty fix would be to give those cultures accepted culture status to the relevant countries, although that might turbocharge Austria even more; or consider cultures that have a core on the province as 'accepted;' or use events to give those cultures as accepted. Really, I know some people are bothered by assimilation in historical terms, and some of that is annoying, but I understand the performance motivation, and I'm only concerned about gameplay. But, thanks for giving the issue attention.

You'd be surprised actually. The game cycles through evey POP every day to update them and this includes immigration. So we are doing that anyway. Adding additional end of year checks can create an end of year hang. The EU series of games can get pretty bad for that. Knowing that this could be a problem we shyed away from it.

I know this isn't the case with everyone, but I have autosave set to be at the end of every year. I already has an end of year hang, so processing time at this time, from my perspective, is totally free since the game is going to sit and think for a moment anyway. And, ultimately, I prefer EU3's end-of-year and end-of-month calculation time to a homogenously slow game.

 

[Sunfighter]

I lowered the global assimilation by nearly 80%. By 1880s the game ground to a halt nearly. Each day taking several seconds haha.....

And I have an OC'ed CPU running at 4.2Ghz haha...