Any word on if there is a melting-pot to represent Seljuk Turks, the Turco-Persian tradition, and/or Anatolian Turks? Can't imagine that they'll remain Oghuz indefinitely.
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Culture issues with CK3
- Thread starter Vias
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I wonder how balkanizing and spliting the bigger cultures would affect the mechanics of cultural innovation, if at all ...
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I wish that number of innovations is locked per era, or it costs scales so you have a reason for a multicultural empire.
I want dynamic cultures. Since culture is now tied to tech and features a cultural head it's going to lead to strange outcomes. Norse in India will have the same cultural head as Norse back home, and will transmit Indian innovations back? Why? Why do they not become their own culture after 100 years of separation?
If it were me I would leave all the static cultures and pre scripted melting pots as they are, but also add dynamic cultures defined by a base culture (the rulers culture) and an altering culture (the culture influencing it). The dynamic culture would just refer to those two (either or both) in the code to determine namelists, modifiers, and available tech and flavour. If a dynamic culture had another melting pot it would just keep its base culture and switch out the altering culture, so Levantine-French mixing with Han would become Han-French, no Frankensteins required. Dynamic cultures should spawn where people are far from the cultural homeland. The conditions could be: a ruler is in a realm where no province has their culture and the whole realm is physically distant from any province of their culture. The event would be something like the ck2 event where you "bring in some settlers" and you get to choose to either keep your own culture or blend it, and if you blend it which one becomes the base culture. Maybe it could just be the ruler's own domain, even if liege controls provinces of his culture?
With dynamic cultures distant rulers of a given culture will get their own cultural head and pursue their own developments in tech, and the homeland will have to physically expand and be able to maintain real political ties if it wishes to get exposure to foreign innovations. Maybe in a future DLC
If it were me I would leave all the static cultures and pre scripted melting pots as they are, but also add dynamic cultures defined by a base culture (the rulers culture) and an altering culture (the culture influencing it). The dynamic culture would just refer to those two (either or both) in the code to determine namelists, modifiers, and available tech and flavour. If a dynamic culture had another melting pot it would just keep its base culture and switch out the altering culture, so Levantine-French mixing with Han would become Han-French, no Frankensteins required. Dynamic cultures should spawn where people are far from the cultural homeland. The conditions could be: a ruler is in a realm where no province has their culture and the whole realm is physically distant from any province of their culture. The event would be something like the ck2 event where you "bring in some settlers" and you get to choose to either keep your own culture or blend it, and if you blend it which one becomes the base culture. Maybe it could just be the ruler's own domain, even if liege controls provinces of his culture?
With dynamic cultures distant rulers of a given culture will get their own cultural head and pursue their own developments in tech, and the homeland will have to physically expand and be able to maintain real political ties if it wishes to get exposure to foreign innovations. Maybe in a future DLC
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I want dynamic cultures. Since culture is now tied to tech and features a cultural head it's going to lead to strange outcomes. Norse in India will have the same cultural head as Norse back home, and will transmit Indian innovations back? Why? Why do they not become their own culture after 100 years of separation?
If it were me I would leave all the static cultures and pre scripted melting pots as they are, but also add dynamic cultures defined by a base culture (the rulers culture) and an altering culture (the culture influencing it). The dynamic culture would just refer to those two (either or both) in the code to determine namelists, modifiers, and available tech and flavour. If a dynamic culture had another melting pot it would just keep its base culture and switch out the altering culture, so Levantine-French mixing with Han would become Han-French, no Frankensteins required. Dynamic cultures should spawn where people are far from the cultural homeland. The conditions could be: a ruler is in a realm where no province has their culture and the whole realm is physically distant from any province of their culture. The event would be something like the ck2 event where you "bring in some settlers" and you get to choose to either keep your own culture or blend it, and if you blend it which one becomes the base culture. Maybe it could just be the ruler's own domain, even if liege controls provinces of his culture?
With dynamic cultures distant rulers of a given culture will get their own cultural head and pursue their own developments in tech, and the homeland will have to physically expand and be able to maintain real political ties if it wishes to get exposure to foreign innovations. Maybe in a future DLC
I would love to see that dynamism
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While I'm not against the introduction of ahistorical melting-pot cultures (say, alternate Norse melting-pots analogous to real-life Normans, Norse-Gaels and Anglo-Norse), in general I'd rather want to see the cultural conversion and assimilation mechanics work so that they're able to produce more realistic results, and implement more historical ways to implement these province culture changes. There are many real-life ethnic groups that remained unassimilated despite being ruled over by nobility of other cultures for centuries. Furthermore, it was more common for the nobility in foreign lands to adopt the local culture than it was for the nobility to force their identity upon the masses; and frequently, events in-game represented as culture conversion in game's mechanics were population migrations where the old ethnic group remained present in their old homelands, either remaining as a minority or completely assimilating to the new group. Not to mention the displacement of ethnic groups due to warfare and resettlement of these lands by the conquerors' ethnic group.I want dynamic cultures. Since culture is now tied to tech and features a cultural head it's going to lead to strange outcomes. Norse in India will have the same cultural head as Norse back home, and will transmit Indian innovations back? Why? Why do they not become their own culture after 100 years of separation?
If it were me I would leave all the static cultures and pre scripted melting pots as they are, but also add dynamic cultures defined by a base culture (the rulers culture) and an altering culture (the culture influencing it). The dynamic culture would just refer to those two (either or both) in the code to determine namelists, modifiers, and available tech and flavour. If a dynamic culture had another melting pot it would just keep its base culture and switch out the altering culture, so Levantine-French mixing with Han would become Han-French, no Frankensteins required. Dynamic cultures should spawn where people are far from the cultural homeland. The conditions could be: a ruler is in a realm where no province has their culture and the whole realm is physically distant from any province of their culture. The event would be something like the ck2 event where you "bring in some settlers" and you get to choose to either keep your own culture or blend it, and if you blend it which one becomes the base culture. Maybe it could just be the ruler's own domain, even if liege controls provinces of his culture?
With dynamic cultures distant rulers of a given culture will get their own cultural head and pursue their own developments in tech, and the homeland will have to physically expand and be able to maintain real political ties if it wishes to get exposure to foreign innovations. Maybe in a future DLC
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Dynamic splitting of cultures is somewhat realistic and manageable, but dynamic melting pots seems impossible to me.
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Sure, why not? Why dismiss the entire mechanic on the basis of something as petty as a strange name combination? I'm confident the developers are competent enough to see where names look weird and create a solution, even if that means only selecting one namelist.
Come on now.
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As a Dutch linguist, thank you for this, I think OP should link to this map for the situation in the low countries. It pains me to see how the devs have managed to make the cultures of that area even worse than in ck2, they seem to fundamentaly misunderstand the relations between the terms 'Dutch' 'Frisian' and 'Franconian'. I would like to add to this map that if the devs want to include Dutch culture it should most definitely not be a melting pot/name change from Frisian as the devs seem to be planning, but a split from Franconian dialects northwest of Aachen and Cologne. Frisians did not invariably adopt this culture either, those west of the modern province Friesland started switching to Dutch in the 11th century from south to north under influence from Dutch/Frankish lords and the immigrants from Flanders that settled there to drain the swamplands. Within Friesland itself they retained their distinct language and culture to this day, and east of there they did not start speaking Dutch but Saxon, and that happened mostly after the CK era. The Saxon areas also most definitely did not become Dutch in any sense of the word during the middle ages.
AFAIK the only part of this that linguists and historians consider to be at all debatable is the moment when we can consider the Lower Franconian language and culture distinct enough from Upper Franconian to be called 'Dutch'. There simply are no good arguments for the situation as the devs present it now, it seems to stem entirely from misunderstandings and anachronisms.
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Looking at that map gets me slightly weirded out once again about the fact that they're using Swabian in particular instead of Alemannic for the southwestern dialects. I mean, it's not entirely wrong, but just... a bit weird?
A dynamic melting pot system by definition would require the ability to get names for every combination of cultures. And if those melting pot cultures can further merge, you then have to deal with Han-French merging with Basque-Magyar-Lombard, to make things even weirder.
That's an enormous number of combinations that would have to be checked manually, and it's very likely that most of them would have weird-looking names, requiring the devs to deal with them manually. Not to mention simple questions like: "in Han-French, does the personal name come before or after the family name," "what are their unique cultural men-at-arms going to be," or "so, what do we actually call Han-French-Basque-Magyar-Lombard?"
If the answer is to just take one of the two cultures as the "master" (using its name-list, name order, special features, etc.), then you don't have a melting pot, you just have a slightly funky assimilation mechanic (not to mention the inevitable complaints on the forum: "Why are my Scots/Poles/Croats becoming English/German/Serbian?" when they "merge" and take an undesired choice of name lists).
Just saying "the devs will work something out" is a common comment on the forums whenever someone proposes a feature, but it's not really a realistic one (both because devs are not in fact blessed with superhuman intelligence and because they have limited time).
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Allow me to direct you to my original post:
Cultures aren't just namelists, it's hardly definitional. Cultures determine the availability of tech and its direction, buildings, flavour events and decisions, localisation for placenames and titles, clothing, and presumably ethnic profiles (not sure how it works in the script though) which altogether are far more substantial than naming characters which, even if it gets weird, is neither gamebreaking nor a reason to dump the desired mechanic entirely even as a possibility.I want dynamic cultures. Since culture is now tied to tech and features a cultural head it's going to lead to strange outcomes. Norse in India will have the same cultural head as Norse back home, and will transmit Indian innovations back? Why? Why do they not become their own culture after 100 years of separation?
If it were me I would leave all the static cultures and pre scripted melting pots as they are, but also add dynamic cultures defined by a base culture (the rulers culture) and an altering culture (the culture influencing it). The dynamic culture would just refer to those two (either or both) in the code to determine namelists, modifiers, and available tech and flavour. If a dynamic culture had another melting pot it would just keep its base culture and switch out the altering culture, so Levantine-French mixing with Han would become Han-French, no Frankensteins required. Dynamic cultures should spawn where people are far from the cultural homeland. The conditions could be: a ruler is in a realm where no province has their culture and the whole realm is physically distant from any province of their culture. The event would be something like the ck2 event where you "bring in some settlers" and you get to choose to either keep your own culture or blend it, and if you blend it which one becomes the base culture. Maybe it could just be the ruler's own domain, even if liege controls provinces of his culture?
With dynamic cultures distant rulers of a given culture will get their own cultural head and pursue their own developments in tech, and the homeland will have to physically expand and be able to maintain real political ties if it wishes to get exposure to foreign innovations. Maybe in a future DLC
If it is too weird the solution could be to just forget dual namelists and focus on the far more important aspects of culture, as in the game changing aspects. If there's a solution for what some think is a big enough problem to forget the mechanic entirely (lol), I think the devs are competent at what they do and have the creativity and intelligence to find it. In what way does this make the mechanic as proposed unworkable or too time consuming to fit into its *8+ year lifespan* of development?
I see no objections to the idea of rulers distant or disconnected from their homeland splitting off and forming their own culture, pursuing their own tech and swapping in some local cultural features and flavour, which is what the proposal is actually about. You're worried about overcomplexity, weird names, semantics over the term "melting pot," and the possible complaints from people on the forums. The first is already addressed even by you, the second is only ancillary to the desired mechanic, the third is a nothingburger, and the fourth is an inevitability for literally anything the devs do or don't do lol.
All in all I will be pretty impressed if they decide to develop cultures further and introduce some dynamism. I would prefer if they think about it earlier rather than later because, as I said, I think the way it is now where each culture has a single person who gets to determine the whole culture's direction, even for those across the world, will give some strange results anyway. I think the objections are a wee bit hysterical, but if we discuss it we're already doing some of the work giving the devs ideas and bringing up possible concerns so they, who actually work on the game, can make the determination based on the relevant facts.
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Sure, cultures include traits other than namelists. And almost all of those would have to be handled manually by the devs on a case by case basis:
- Localizations have the same problems as namelists.
- Flavor events/decisions, to the extent they are meaningful, would also have to be done manually (and are fairly few and far between anyway, at least in CK2, where most of them are religion/geography based anyway; I'd rather the devs spend the time making the existing cultures unique instead).
- Again, unique techs/buildings/MaAs need to be addressed by some sort of rule (and we know that the techs, at least, tend to have a geographic component)
And you haven't addressed the mechanical issues: what to call it, what cultural group it ends up belonging to, and yes, the name list, what conditions to trigger them (after all, plenty of areas involved multicultural realms without some sort of melting pot, so you'd need some significant restrictions unless you want the HRE to end up as a monocultural Franco-German-Slavic blob every game).
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I addressed all those issues...
You copy the chosen base culture over to give the culture group, presumably the names, maybe the ethnic profile, etc., and then you reference the altering culture for the additional or swapped out stuff, like buildings, available tech, etc. Whatever feels like the right rule for the people who actually know how the engine works should be good enough.
The "issue" that was brought up, the one that was so urgent and important that it took precedence over all these later objections about mechanics which were already addressed in the original post, is the potential for weird names. It doesn't bother me, but others clearly feel some way about it. If devs agree then don't mix namelists, if they can make a solution that will please you then good luck to them, I hope they do it.
I also gave my idea for conditions under which they might spawn.
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Be honest, despite it being quoted in the post you replied to, you didn't read my post at all. :/
EDIT:
I thought I could make it clearer what I have in mind. Just imagine it looking like this:
cul_47576435 = {
name = "Franco-Greek"
base_culture = greek
alt_culture = frankish
cul_head = 2762628*
innovations = { x x x }*
color = { 255, 255, 255 }*
is_custom = yes
}
*idk how these things look in the code in ck3 obviously but just use your imagination lol.
Like how custom titles were like "dyn_7272826" and referenced a base title to get its coat of arms you use those reference cultures to get the dynamic culture's features. The features could be additive, substitutive, or either depending on the feature. The (non-tech) features wouldn't be stored in the savefile, those scopes would be used to grab what is needed according to the rules they lay down for dynamic cultures. I'm sorry if the way I initially described it was confusing.
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any dynamic melting pot system will end up with melting pots being the rule rather than exception, as they should be. there is a reason there were so few "melting pots" in CK2's timeframe, and I would argue English shouldn't even be a melting pot. there's a good argument to be made that Middle English is a natural development of Old English rather than some fusion of Norman and Old English, but of course there is a traditional narrative of Normans being part of the English "mix" so I get why it's in the game.
I don't want to see "franco-german" appear in east France because of the HRE, I don't want to see Norse-Spanish or something stupid like that. I would much rather see melting pots in rare circumstances where they make historical sense than see a bunch of janky weirdness because of a system which would easily become unwieldy.
I don't want to see "franco-german" appear in east France because of the HRE, I don't want to see Norse-Spanish or something stupid like that. I would much rather see melting pots in rare circumstances where they make historical sense than see a bunch of janky weirdness because of a system which would easily become unwieldy.
I agree that dynamic cultures should be a rare event which is why I think an event/decision to make one should only fire where a ruler's own realm is distant and disconnected from provinces of their own culture, from the cultural heartland.
I don't think we should be limiting ourselves to what happened historically. Half of the game is about doing exactly what didn't happen in history. Taking that principle to its logical extreme would leave us with a game made up of a long string of events that force historical outcomes. Even so, cultural exchange between a foreign implanted elite and a local population is very much an historical thing.
I've seen a lot of janky weirdness in CK2, like Sweden converting to Islam and being settled by Khazars because the nomads managed to get a single province on the Baltic through a vassal. I've also seen a Welsh character called Guillaume become a child of destiny (Y Mab Darogan? Lmao), create a single-province kingdom called "Guillaumeia" in Khiva (just Khiva), take three lovers, and convert to Buddhism.
That stuff is half the fun.
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This is the same issue with heresies being dynamic, unless you get events for all of them you'll just get random things, which because of holy wars being harder to do means they'll stick around more.
But Outremer being in the French group of ck2, irregardless of who actually won the crusades was quite annoying
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the problem though is that dynamic systems always 1. lack flavor and 2. lack quality compared to things which are strictly defined. It's also unrealistic for there to be coded hybrid cultures for every situation that arises, therefore I think it's preferable that we limit it to cases which are likely to occur in the game. I'm fine with things like Outremer, for example (and if you look at real life, crusaders in the Middle East did, in fact, adopt aspects of local culture, even learning how to rule in the region from people like the Armenians, and adopting dress of the region) and I don't mind Norse hybrids in England or Ireland.I agree that dynamic cultures should be a rare event which is why I think an event/decision to make one should only fire where a ruler's own realm is distant and disconnected from provinces of their own culture, from the cultural heartland.
I don't think we should be limiting ourselves to what happened historically. Half of the game is about doing exactly what didn't happen in history. Taking that principle to its logical extreme would leave us with a game made up of a long string of events that force historical outcomes. Even so, cultural exchange between a foreign implanted elite and a local population is very much an historical thing.
I've seen a lot of janky weirdness in CK2, like Sweden converting to Islam and being settled by Khazars because the nomads managed to get a single province on the Baltic through a vassal. I've also seen a Welsh character called Guillaume become a child of destiny (Y Mab Darogan? Lmao), create a single-province kingdom called "Guillaumeia" in Khiva (just Khiva), take three lovers, and convert to Buddhism.
That stuff is half the fun.
The problem, though, is that much more often in history, a ruler of a foreign culture assimilated to the natives and did not have a significant impact on the local culture. This is just a fact, which so many people on here refuse to accept. The Germans ruling over Sicily did not make Sicilian culture German, for example, cultures survive with a lot more tenacity and adapt much less than people on these forums seem to believe. I do not want a system which creates hybrid cultures just because a Hungarian reaches the throne of Aquitaine (wow, Magyar-Occitan! Amazing!)
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Yes I agree, thankfully in my game Guillaume the Great (Gwilym Fawr?) Of Guillaumeia converted to the local Sogdian culture -- it would've been a little weird to see it flip to Welsh. A Cambro-Sogdian culture would've been a little improbable, even if very deserving for such a glorious king.
If it were me I would tailor the availability of the spawn and any option weights such that it is rare but believable. Ruler prestige could play a role, or the relative strength (# of provinces) of each culture, or relative tech advancement of the same, or whether the ruler has count-tier vassals of his own culture, or count-tier vassals of the local culture, or whether he employs locals on his council, his learning, or maybe if his capital has his culture but no other province does (and he's far from the heartland). The script might get a little complicated depending on how restrictive you want to be.
Just speaking to my own preferences I'd like to see maybe 3 or 4 dynamic cultures spawn per playthrough, not counting the static, scripted melting pots like English and Outremer.
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The Staufens (briefly) ruling two sicilies did not make the culture very German, but they did patronise sicilian and help make it a written language. The Normans helped make the barons as strong as in England during the Anarchy and so making Sicily hard to rule for quite a while indeed with how rebellious they could become. Sicilian being a melting pot from Norman and Lombard, rather than sicily being just Italian culture could be quite nice, Greeks in sicily remaining Greek ofc