Better POP assimilation

[NobillyT]

And, ultimately, I prefer EU3's end-of-year and end-of-month calculation time to a homogenously slow game.

I could live with that too, if perhaps some calculations for POP migration, promotion, factory viability, or assimilation could be done on a monthly basis.

Another thought (though I'm not sure how feasible this idea is, or how beneficial it would be performance wise) would be to maybe somehow stagger these calculations. In other words, instead of trying to crunch all the numbers everyday, only a subset of them would be calculated each day, with the whole lot of numbers being crunched every few days.

 

[BonSequitur]

Indeed, that makes sense. There are a ton of things that don't really need to work on a day-to-day basis - hell, in the period, they really didn't. If you take, say, seven subsets of calculations that the game currently does, and you stagger them - pop migration on monday, assimilation on tuesday, artisan production on wednesday, and so on - you could gain a ton of performance with very little gameplay impact - I hope.

Of course, you'd have to increase the rate of everything sevenfold because it happens weekly rather than daily, but still.

 

[quetzilla]

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.

What if you just assimilated once a week instead, staggered for each province? (based on the last digit of the ID or something).

edit: lol, great minds think alike, at exactly the same time.

----

Also, British assimilating to Afro-American really isn't that odd. This is culture, not ethnicity. They're not putting on blackface, they're changing the way they live and interact with each other. Anyone who's lived in the US knows there's plenty of 'Yankees' who have assimilated to 'Afro-American'...

 

[birdboy2000]

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.

I'm going to second this comment completely. I don't mind a bit of hang at the end of the month or year.

 

[semaphore]

The problem with staggering, I'd imagine, is to find 7 (or whatever number you're using) sets of calculations that take roughly the same time to perform. Otherwise you'd end up in a situation where the game speed speeds up and slows down throughout the week/month/10 day period. Same problem for staggering by province.

End of month calculations seem like a better choice to me, in unmodded EU3 at least the end of month/year delays didn't seem like a big deal.

 

[BonSequitur]

If you stagger by the last digit in the ID number of provinces, then theoretically it should be, statistically, a similar enough workload that there wouldn't be significant fluctuation in day length (More than there already is).

 

[amcl]

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 wouldn't be surprised at all. The ideal solution, rewriting the update code (clearly a case for carefully optimised hand coding in assembly language, no?), can be discounted as impractical. So what's left?

You reduced the size of the problem by having assimilation reduce the number of POPs to be handled but kept the update cycle at one day. An alternative, less reduction in POPs but also reducing the number of update cycles by running then weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, might be worth considering.

 

[attackdrone]

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 modded the assimilation rate to a lower value in my Victoria II game to 40% of base with the following code attached:

	modifier = {
		factor = -0.6
		OR = {
			continent = europe
			continent = asia
			continent = africa
		}
	}
	modifier = {
		factor = 0.6
		OR = {
			continent = north_america
			continent = south_america
		}
	}

Of course, this created far too little assimilation in Europe (which I expected, I just wanted to check trends). What I did not expect was what I will call "Rampant Pan-Nationalism." I ended up with Russian Pan-Nationalists in Austria, German Pan-Nationalists in Russia, Yugoslavian Pan-Nationalists rampaging into the Baltic... and a fractured patchwork of nations worse than any Crusader Kings "Germany AI Realm Duress."

What is the threshold for a culture existing in a province spawning Pan-Nationalist rebels? If there's just 3000 militant people of that culture in the province, such as 3000 North Germans who have emigrated to Paris, does that make the territory eligible for Pan-Nationalism to arise?

 

[SchwarzKatze]

Is it possible to introduce some kind of "Culture Group" concept from EU to V2? This way silly things like Southern Chinese(Nanfangren?) becoming Manchu instead of Northern Chinese which is way more possible and British in America would become a more "European" culture instead of Afro-Americans. British Indians would be in the "Indian" group and being an accepted culture of the UK so assimilation would still work but an India with 50% of British people wouldn't exist.

 

[amcl]

Another way to simplify processing of assimilation & promotions could be to reduce the number of cultures.

Why have North German and South German? Was there a great South German nationalist struggle that has been erased from history? Why Beifangren and Nanfangren instead of just "Han"? A malus to make "Han" Chinese as militant as minorities could be added since there's already a "has_country_flag = manchu_elite_cleared_out" in the game. What do we gain from having Ainu distinct from Japanese when they are ~1% of the population and an accepted culture anyway? In the period of the game, is there a reason to distinguish Kazhak from Kirghiz and Uzbek from Uighur? If not, make then all "Turkmen" or whatever.

I'm sure there are more that could be amalgamated without significant loss in gameplay.

 

[unmerged(48800)]

America should keep the high assimilation.

Also Don´t you feel there is need a intermediate culture type, like culture from a cultural group in EU3? First in Victoria 1, before the patches all south america were Spanish or Portuguese, That´s of course was´t realistic nor a solution, but I think have a culture group like Spaniards, or Iberian should be great. Same for British so they can finally have scottish! German group so not same penalty of South germans and Frenchies if you are Prussia, etc.

What are your opinion?

 

[unmerged(61066)]

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.

What if you would create some variables which could be used for modding?
Like pop size comparing to the whole population?
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 or oddities.
I don't know how difficult would it be to create new variables tho..

 

[xox]

I always thought yankee taking over in the south of the US was intentional to reflect the historic lessening of the regional differences and the lessening of states rights and local differences after the US civil war.

I like the idea of local main cultures however I think you would need to also add a 'cvilized' and 'uncivilized' factor to cultures for this- native Americans should assimilate to the US whilst Italians should not to Austria. This would be different to civilized and uncivilized states though or else you would get British India, China, etc... Perhaps urbanised/unurbanised is a better word?- then old world uncivilized states could be grouped in with the European nations.
Exceptions in colonial states would be good too- or else you would get much of the US being dominated by whatever immigrant group gets their first.

 

[Ignudo]

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.

I think you really made a bad decision on that one. If you think about this era you have to arrive at the conclusion that cultural identity and national movements where probably the most important force behind history. Just think about how WWI started and how it ended: Austria was split up into smaller nations according to culture. Germany lost the regions with large polish populations. As it is now it is a really dumb experience to play Austria. You just have to hold on to the non german regions long enough and they will eventually become German. Instead of becoming increasingly more difficult to keep this regions from seperation as conciousness rises, it becomes easier over time. From a gameplay point of view this is disastrous and Austria is probably one of the most interesting countries to play as it is a GP but still shouldn't face easy times. Of course the fact that India gradually becomes British is equally insane in terms of gameplay. This list could go on forever. Just think about the colonization of Africa. Instead of colonial migration you can just wait until Zulus miraculously transform into Europeans.

Personally, I think this issue is game breaking and there is not even a chance to fix it by modding. Even if you should stick with your strategic choice to give up one of the most important aspects of history for better performance, you'll eventually have to provide the hardcore community with the necessary variables to take care of this via modding. If it doesn't seem that there are a lot of players disgruntled about this it is only because there are a number of more obvious things that are wrong with this game (e.g. no GP alliances, which is also game breaking to me). Personally, I've bought the game shortly after release but didn't even play one serious game so far. The most time I spent with V2, I spent in the mods subforum but you didn't even bother to give us the tools to make this a decent game on our own. I'm sorry to say that your claims to provide an enjoyable game out of the box were proven utterly wrong.

 

[BonSequitur]

Yes, it's a major issue that Austria barely gets nationalist rebels, even when they are breaking under masses of other rebels.

Perhaps rebels of other kinds should 'turn nationalist' if they take appropriate provinces? Like, if Spanish communists take over Cuba, they should after a while occupying it, consider just seceding from Spain and becoming an independent, communist Cuba.

 

[Ignudo]

I'd really like to hear from Paradox if they'll at least introduce some variables with the upcoming versions to give modders the chance to take care of this issue. I would be perfectly willing to accept a slower performance for this. But for the people who do not or can not nothing would change.

Besides, I don't really see how the particular issue most of us are worried about, namely the extinction of former majority populations would increase the number of pops. Even if the majority pops assimilate to the national culture, they don't really extinguish completely due to their large initial size. A moding variable like province_majority_culture could also be used to let smaller pops that don't belong to the primary or accepted cultures assimilate to the province majority culture. This way we would only end up with a numerical redistribution of individual pops but not much change of aggregate pops.

It seems to me that you have somewhat neglected the assimilation issue after you have initially decided at the design-stage that it would be to ressource intensive. I'm totally convinced that there is an elegant solution to provide the desired effect. If you introduce the concept of province majority populations you could possible increase the standard assimilation rate even further as it wouldn't really matter that much anymore from a gameplay point of view. In the end you might even end up with less pops than before.

 

[sortulv]

Assimilation should perhaps better have been in percentage of the target pop, rather than the orginator pop. That would let assimilations in core provinces happen rather quickly, while areas where your culture is in less represented than the poplulations being assimilated, assimilation would be slow.

 

[NoClass]

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.

Hrmmm, you elected to count every pop every day over periodic pop cleaning? Might I suggest checking every pop but once a month, and randomly distributing the day when a given pop is fixed. i.e. 1/30th of the total pops gets checked every day, but every pop gets a look once a month. It's not like migration is a day-to-day decision anyway.

 

[the_legion]

How about this (hot)fix:

- Add a modifier "core_population" to (most of) the starting population in Asia and Africa
- Pops with this modifier would be excluded from migration to outside of the country and overseas (even if inside the country) and totally excluded from assimilation.
Pops in Asia and Africa weren't very mobile anyway and that solves the problem of British-India and potential British-China beeing all-british populated.

- Add another modifier which reduces assimilation and internal european Migration
drastically thus protecting historical minorities. Even if Germany had conquered all
of France they wouldn't turn into germans. That's valid for most european cultures.

- Add a modifier to make north_german > south_german or north_italian south_italian assimilation extremely quick.


---------
Better would be a completely new assimilation/migration system but that could work.

 

[Raph]

How about this (hot)fix:

- Add a modifier "core_population" to (most of) the starting population in Asia and Africa
- Pops with this modifier would be excluded from migration to outside of the country and overseas (even if inside the country) and totally excluded from assimilation.
Pops in Asia and Africa weren't very mobile anyway and that solves the problem of British-India and potential British-China beeing all-british populated.

V1 had long-range/short-range cultures, where European and Chinese (IIRC) were long-range and all others were short-range. This meant almost no migration from Africa and Asia apart from China. Has there been any comments form devs or so whether this system is still in and, if not, why not?