0. We implement a X.Y percent "westernized" counter that when you read 100% your civilized, this focuses on military, economic and diplomatic development and should ONLY require Freedom of Trade, but each tech you add contributes a percentage, somethings are absolute increases (military) but in theory cost too much money to pursue alone, Technology is absolute, Diplomatic acceptance is also an absolute increase but in multiplayer requires the players to play ball with you, in singleplayer just get relations to 100% and request recognition.
Factories, trade volumn, and national/state infrastructure are relative increases based on country size, so for china its a longer and more difficult process then for Siam.
Another thing about this idea is that we can also apply it to other countries, like Russia, and change it so instead of 100%, make it something like 70% to become an independent nation to represent Russia's and Turkey's statuses as hyrbid nations of only partial westernization, we could also make it so that this value can decrease and thus some nations can slide back into uncivilized status.
1. The westernization process should be a process of where the 'unciv' nation develops along western lines: Military, Infrastructure, Trade, Industry, literacy, Corruption.
2. The military can be seen as modernized via the buying or production of modern arms, this should be keyed to the willingness of the nation to spend the hard currency to import it, or via producing modern arms via factories he builds up, the former is faster but expensive and could drag the other sectors, while simply waiting to build them yourself focuses you on developing all the others first, which may be faster overrall but maybe leave you militarily weak if you lack the monies to do both.
3. Infrastructure: The construction of 'modern' (for a given definition of modern) roads and railways, I would suggest VIP2 modders redo railway levels to be 4 levels of roads and 4 levels of railways as separate, roads effectively do the same as railways but allow for a more gradual effiency bonus and movement speedtimes.
Infra should be developed either by building it yourself, (with cash) or have capitalists build em. Infrastructure alone only indirectly helps the process via increased effiency, raising industry score and income. Also included is constructing trade ports* (a trade port being something where goods get stored before being traded if we wanted to track physical location of goods prior to consumption, this could link to railroads having additional functionality, like the Hoi3 supply system, rails are needed for transnational and international movement of goods), shipyards (for specific ship building), and eventually maybe airports?
For the purposes of westernization, having a rough railway network, like say along the coast of china, beijing to shanghai probly sufficient for the initial civilization score.
*I also suggest adding additional provincial buildings.
4. Trade, uncivs should research freedom of trade before they can use the international market, until then pops can/should only be able to trade via rivers, and with pops 1 state over, or across straights. Once you get freedom of trade you need to build a trade depot/port to begin trading, pops can only access the international market once there's a railway link to a trade port.
Your total volumn in trade has a relative increase on your westernization status, with an absolute bonus increase within freedom of trade, the more pops that can access the world/regional market the higher the percentage goes.
5. Industry, building factories, manning them, and producing goods should be a relative increase based on physical construction of factories, the number of pops manning them, and the money made from selling goods, also the level/quality of goods produce should all contribute.
6. Literacy, as it increases it should also increase your westernization score as well as the indirect effect of increasing economic effiency, having extremely low literacy should be what represents the lack of rp generation, thus as your literacy increases to the double digits your rp/month rate should approach that of the Westernized nations, improving certain literacy related infrastructures such as schools or universities should help boost the rate literacy increases and provide a higher bureaucrat and clerk generation.
7. Corruption, uncivilized nations I think should be seen as having a high degree of 'corruption', meaning a significant amount of machine politics on the local level, revolt risk (and spiking RR when you try to fight corruption), and your corruption should take the place of the Unciv modifer on income, say uncivs only got 1/10 of its income in vanilla, under this system having 90% corruption at start should have the same effect, fighting this corruption should allow you to reclaim tax income, thus even if your not technically civilized fighting corruption can allow you to be competitive much earlier.
Fighting corruption should and can be represented as clamping down on unrest, and raising crime fighting should help fight it.
Final Point: As pointed out and suggested many times by others, westernization if a gradual process should have numerous conservative elites who will be fighting it tooth and nail as it represents an attack on their current privileges, and it is this elites who are terrible commanders and currently more or less selling you out for their own position, thus every little bit you increase your development, there should be corresponding increases in the revolt risk of aristocrats, soldier pops, and officers who share their ideology and some peasants who can be bribed into bandwagoning with their revolt.
As such each step represented by an increase in the Westernization Points also represents an step towards centralization, this could allow some modeling of attempts of provincial and fringe areas by minorities who see this as an oppurtunity to break free, along with secret societies, etc.
This is to provide the challenge portion, managing revolt risk and the increasing consciousness westernization causes, think about it, to build factories and railways your either gonna need foreign engineers, or domestic ones... In fact this provides my next idea, an event that gives you the option to focus on getting your own engineers and skilled workers to drive your modernization, or hire foreign instructors to do it for you, if you do the former literacy increases with only a small increase in consciousness but hurt relations with foreign powers (and push back your ability to get recognition), if you accept, then you get a MILL and a CON increase as well as a bigger literacy increase.
As I was saying, by westernizing your expousing your populace to western ideas, which includes liberalism, democracy, rights, etc, things that make your people question your absolute rule just as they support the process, so MILL will go down for pops that benefit, like craftsmen, clerks, labourers but increase for those whose privileges get taken away and CON increases all around, higher for the poor strata, lower increase for the rich strata (as theyre already educated).
Thus we balance the westernization process, against the threat of revolts and reactive forces, at the sametime we have it broken down into a far more gradual process one that could or may take longer, but would also allow an Unciv to be effective much earlier.
