I think most EUIV players can agree it has something to do with language, customs and the common way a people live, act and think, and that it deserves to be expounded upon or revised in EU4.
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Can we talk about the awkward single-culture groups?
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I think most EUIV players can agree it has something to do with language, customs and the common way a people live, act and think, and that it deserves to be expounded upon or revised in EU4.
To play devil's advocate: which culture group should Hungarian be in, when in fact Hungarians had a similar kinship with Czechs, Poles, Austrians, and Romanians at the same time?
(edit: yes that's right none of the southern slavs balkan nationalists pls go)
As I said early, one of their own; a Carpathian group with Hungarian, Romanian and Transylvanian.
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This seems reasonable ....
I have also took picture from the Wiki and put EU4 map over it and here's the result:
From this we can see following:
Hungarian provinces - Sopron, Pest, Szabolcs, Bekes, Somogy, Torontal and maybe Bihar
Romanian/Transylvanian - Temes, Honyad, Maros and maybe Bihar
Croatian - Varasd, Slavonia, Zagreb and Lika
Slovak - Pozsony, Szepes and maybe Zemplen (50/50 with Ruthenian)
Ruthenian - Maramaros and maybe Zemplen (50/50 with Slovak)
Put Hungarian, Romanian and Transylvanian Cultures to Carpathian culture group.
Put Slovak (if PDOX decide to add this culture) to West Slavic culture group
Wallachia and Moldavia have currently Romanian culture in game so there is room to expand and you will also fix the problem that Romanian culture should not be in South Slavic culture group.
This is just my point of view on this topic.
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You missed my point. I think that group should exist too (although I'd call it Danubian), but my point was that EU4's culture system as-is cannot possibly portray Hungarian accurately, since it fits into multiple extant culture groups.
As I said, it shouldn't be called Slovak. How about "Upper Hungarian" (but still in the West Slavic group)?
Re Zemplen, it makes more sense for it to be Upper Hungarian than Romanian, as the capital is "Kassa", which as far as I know is the Hungarian name for Kosice in modern Slovakia. Also, I think I can see "Kaschan" on that wiki map clearly in the Slovak area (that is an 1880 map, after the Upper Hungarian Slavs started calling themselves Slovak)
Also, what about Szekely Land? Should Maros (I think it's Maros; the southeasternmost province of Hungary in 1444) be Hungarian, with Hunyad and Temes Romanian?
Still though, Carpathian/Danubian group makes more sense than putting either Magyars or Romanians in with the South Slavs.
Re Zemplen, it makes more sense for it to be Upper Hungarian than Romanian, as the capital is "Kassa", which as far as I know is the Hungarian name for Kosice in modern Slovakia. Also, I think I can see "Kaschan" on that wiki map clearly in the Slovak area (that is an 1880 map, after the Upper Hungarian Slavs started calling themselves Slovak)
Also, what about Szekely Land? Should Maros (I think it's Maros; the southeasternmost province of Hungary in 1444) be Hungarian, with Hunyad and Temes Romanian?
Still though, Carpathian/Danubian group makes more sense than putting either Magyars or Romanians in with the South Slavs.
The Székely and Szászok are too splintered and intermingled to be represented accurately; it'd be better to just call areas with a very mixed (read: majority is tiny) Székely, Szász, and/or Romanian population 'Transylvanian'.
Szász districts around Buda? The general Szász diaspora in the kingdom? Also note areas like Kokel, Szilagy, and Klausburg.
I don't think I even understood your point to begin with, sadly...
But any argument about Hungary is going to produce some argument; Carpathian is the best solution since it approaches it more on cultural and historical grounds than linguistic.
At the end of the day, it's all a matter of people's opinions. My own view is that cultures represent local languages, but other people would say it represents something different and I think that because of this divide in people's opinions of what culture actually represents, it would be hard to know which culture goes where or which culture is distinct from another! Perhaps what we really need is a clear picture of what culture represents. Still, for anyone that also agrees that cultures represent languages then here is my suggestion:
I would vouch for Hungarian to be a Finno-Ugric culture. It may sound strange, but the Hungarian language is closer to Finnish than most people think, and as such it is categorized as a Finno-Ugric language in real life. This obviously is more of a quest towards more accurate representation as opposed to what would balance the game. They would still be very singled out in terms of culture in their area, but Hungarians are most definitely not closely linked to Romanians, as I've seen some people on here suggest. I am a Romanian, and understand literally no Hungarian. Some words in Russian are the same, some words in German are the same, huge amounts of words in Latin are the same, but Hungarian seems to be fundamentally different. Because of this reason I wouldn't support grouping Hungarian with Romanian if the Finno-Ugric solution does not satisfy. I don't know how similar it is to slavic but if people want it to be grouped to a neighbouring culture group, my vote lies with the Slavs.
I would vouch for Hungarian to be a Finno-Ugric culture. It may sound strange, but the Hungarian language is closer to Finnish than most people think, and as such it is categorized as a Finno-Ugric language in real life. This obviously is more of a quest towards more accurate representation as opposed to what would balance the game. They would still be very singled out in terms of culture in their area, but Hungarians are most definitely not closely linked to Romanians, as I've seen some people on here suggest. I am a Romanian, and understand literally no Hungarian. Some words in Russian are the same, some words in German are the same, huge amounts of words in Latin are the same, but Hungarian seems to be fundamentally different. Because of this reason I wouldn't support grouping Hungarian with Romanian if the Finno-Ugric solution does not satisfy. I don't know how similar it is to slavic but if people want it to be grouped to a neighbouring culture group, my vote lies with the Slavs.
There's just so much more than language when it comes to culture. Grouping together Finns with their slash and burn practices, Estonian pirates.. and horse riding Magyars? Just because some guys in their ivory towers dissected thoses languages and found some similarities? I'm sorry but I wholeheartedly disagree. Culture is something that exists out there. It is obvious. It is practical. 1 = 1 and |1^-3| = 1 too. But the latter just doesnt exist out there and therefore for the world at large 1 + |1^-3| = 2 is pedantic BS. And in game terms, what would grouping together such far off cultures give us? Will Hungary ever conquer Finland and therefore we feel the need to make it easier for Magyars to keep Finns under control more than Swedes? And definetely easier than, say, nearby Rascians?
To me, linguistic kinship is about mutual inteligibility, at least to some standardised written form. Everything else is just for the books. And geography trumps language anyway. Traditionally Pontic Greeks were culturally extremely close to other Caucasians like Georgians etc, a relation that the Helladic Greek culture doesn't necessarily fully capture, even though theyre cultural kin to Pontic Greeks, who in turn don't fully experience the relationship with Italy that Helladic Greeks have had historically. So even having a Carpathian group on the existsing terms would be a cop out. Galicia/Volhynia should be Carpathian too as it's the Carpathian trade lifeline to Kiev, and the Lower Danube is really not such sharp a boundary.
TBH the game just needs more overlapping culture groups. Big macro groups like Byzantine, Central European, Turco-Persian, Romance / linguistic groups based on some form of intelligibility and dialect continua like Arabic, German, Chinese, Catalan-Occitan / geographic groups like Baltic, British, Indian, Netherlandish, Levantine. That way any tag with a particular culture can have it very easy in taking game resources out of provinces where many culture groups overlap like the Southern Balkans, Iberia, Scandinavia etc. It would be able to successfully push to natural borders and the areas for the following expansion and diplomacy would be intuitive and plausible. I've always meant to write an extensive suggestion on this but I don't have the time to find hard rules on things like whether Indian, Baltic, East Elbian etc is a geographic or macro-cultural group or whether it is too small or too big a group to suit game balance for every corner of the map. Sadly I'm not a paid advisor to PDS (hint, hint @Wiz
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I think I just hit a new record for most downvotes on a single post.
Well, you win some and you lose some. At least, I'd like to think that I opened up a good conversation here.
Cultures in EU4 are controversial issues and you wont get that easily a consensus on it.
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If I'm asked, I'd just suggest we remove the culture group system and use something more versatile, like a distance.
Instead, we introduce a concept of "distance" between any two cultures. Say the distance between Castile and Portuguese is 2, while the distance between Castile and French is 6.
Then we introduce the following rules:
1. At any time, if (the distance between A and B) + (the distance between B and C) < (the distance between A and C), the distance between A and C should be updated to not violate triangular inequality.
2. For any pair of cultures that do not have a pre-designated distance, they automatically get a maximum value, say 12. Of course if this maximum value violates Rule 1, it will be immediately adjusted.
With the above rules, for example, if we do not pre-designate the distance between French and Portuguese , it will automatically get a 8 (=2+6).
Then we can use distance instead of culture groups. As a bonus it's more fine-grained, both in value and the web of kinship it's able to represent. With this system, both linguistic relationship (Hungarian-Finn, if you want this you can give it a 10 or 11 to represent these cultures are slightly closer than two completely distant cultures) and geographical relationship (Hungarian-Romanian) can be treated. Multi-level culture groups can also be represented well.
Certain events can also manipulate these distances a bit. For example, Manchu can now start with a culture very different from Chinese, but when it forms Qing it brings Manchu closer to various Chinese cultures. The rule 1 will in turn bring Manchu slightly closer to almost all Eastern Asian cultures, laying ground stones for QIng's dominance.
Instead, we introduce a concept of "distance" between any two cultures. Say the distance between Castile and Portuguese is 2, while the distance between Castile and French is 6.
Then we introduce the following rules:
1. At any time, if (the distance between A and B) + (the distance between B and C) < (the distance between A and C), the distance between A and C should be updated to not violate triangular inequality.
2. For any pair of cultures that do not have a pre-designated distance, they automatically get a maximum value, say 12. Of course if this maximum value violates Rule 1, it will be immediately adjusted.
With the above rules, for example, if we do not pre-designate the distance between French and Portuguese , it will automatically get a 8 (=2+6).
Then we can use distance instead of culture groups. As a bonus it's more fine-grained, both in value and the web of kinship it's able to represent. With this system, both linguistic relationship (Hungarian-Finn, if you want this you can give it a 10 or 11 to represent these cultures are slightly closer than two completely distant cultures) and geographical relationship (Hungarian-Romanian) can be treated. Multi-level culture groups can also be represented well.
Certain events can also manipulate these distances a bit. For example, Manchu can now start with a culture very different from Chinese, but when it forms Qing it brings Manchu closer to various Chinese cultures. The rule 1 will in turn bring Manchu slightly closer to almost all Eastern Asian cultures, laying ground stones for QIng's dominance.
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China Japan and Korea should be Chinese, the cultures are hardly unique to the average person. Indio china for Vietnam etc etc.
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This idea is pretty interesting. However, I can hardly imagine how the UI stuff for this would look. Discussions about why the distances are chosen as they would be then replace discussions about culture groupings. Transitive distances could get out of hand, soon.
I love the application of the triangle inequality. What makes you think of culture being meaningfully mappable to the Euclidean plane? Lovely engineer model.
Mutual wars and demarcation tendencies could actually make close-but-not-identical cultures harder to rule.
I personally would like to be able to accept culture groups, not only single cultures. But an "accepted group" should not be the same as a proper accepted culture, you would just get the reduced penalties as if you were of the same culture group.
If multi-cultures/religions for provinces ever happen, make them 1 per basetax, rural territories will be more homogenous, cities can be heterogeneous. No need to get into percantages here.
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The proposed system would allow it to make Hunagiran close to Austrian and Romanian at the same time. At least in the case of Hungarian it seems to work better than the current system.