So in short my idea is that personal Unions like poland-lithuania could be available for every country, but i will go in detail below:
At first just to uinderstand some limitations of this whole mechanic i kinda sorted all the nations into 4 categories.
So by now it should be possible for a future paradox game to really play around with flags and their customination and combination. and i think with that it would be quite intersting to make integrating personal Unions a bit more unique instead of just annexing them. i will talk about the limitations later more in detail but here are some examples before i go more in detail:
1. There are limits of PUs you can show on your flag/name
2. Depending on your size and Tier you are only allowed to intergrate specific countries in this special way
Example: Swabia:
Swabia is the nation meant to be a unified realm of all swabian provinces (and of course of the historical swabian kingdom). So it should be not possible for it to form a union like Swabia-Wurttemberg. so if you are a Tier III nation you should not be able to create unions with Tier I, Tier II and Tier IV (Germany-Swabia makes no sense aswell) nations of the same exact culture (culture group for Tier IV nations) as that would lead to a redundant Union another example would be: Poland-Mazowia (shouldnt be possible as Poland is already meant to be a union for all polish cultural provinces) or France-Orleans. I think you get the point i am trying to make here.
it would be still possible to create unions with nations of other cultures, no matter the tier (e.g. Polish and any germany cultured nation)
or with nations within the same culture group but different culture. (within german culture for example Swabia and bavaria).
here are some more example of what i mean with that all:
So as you can see Poland-Bohemia would be possible as poland has no natural claim to be also the unified country for czech/bohemian people. Moravia would be just a tier lower.
But stuff like Poland-Krakow would not work as krakow and poland are both polish but poland is already the country for all poles, i guess it should be clear now what i mean
Limitations:
Obviously this mechanic needs limitations. You can have as manys PUs as before but the special option to integrate your Junior partner like that should be limited.
If you have a valid PU for this mechanic there will be 2 options for you too choose from.
Effects:
Flags:
As shown above after integrating a country like that your flags are getting merched together (historical examples for examples are Spain and Poland-Lithuania)
Or just let the user design an own flag in an editor like for custom nations or so? i think paradox could offer just multiple options for the user to choose from.
Name:
It should be clear that in this case the name of your country would also change and i think the game could give the player some preset options to choose from
Claims:
For this topic i kinda created that Tier system in the first place in my head to make it a bit more understandable.
example: Poland-Germany and Poland Swabia
Poland should already have claims on all polish provinces, as soon as it gets the PU over Germany and integrated it, it will inherit Germanys claim on all german cultural provinces aswell (mission tree claims are ignored). If it was just Swabia they inherited, then they get claims on all swabian provinces, etc.
these claims are only working for Tier III and Tier IV countries, Tier II (e.g. Wurtemberg) and Tier I (e.g Ulm) wont really give Poland any extra claims, besides their original cores.
What if…?
National Ideas:
One thing i thought could be really interesting is that if you inherit a country you can choose to replace some of your national ideas with your Junior partner ones.
example: Austria-hungary:
In this case i took 4 ideas of Austria and 3 ideas of hungary to create the Austrian-Hungarian Ideas. It maybe sounds a bit too op at first to simply beeing able to choose ideas just like that but here should be obviously also limitations:
Bonus thoughts about Tier 1 nations:
City tags should have a unique relationship to their main/capital/home province.
Example: If Aachen conquers the whole rhineland and establishes a small empire but then after a war it loses the provinces of Aachen to France or so, should it still be called Aachen? i think no. Even their national ideas strictly refers to the city itself so technically it makes no sense that the nation of Aachen keeps its name and ideas like „Charlemagnes capital“ if they actually dont own it anymore. Things like that should be maybe handled by province modifiers in the future or atleast influenced by it
This could be handled with a similar system like the native american federations or setting up a satelite state or even a light version of custom nations, your new standard name will be your current capital and a random flag appears that you can change like in the previous mentioned mechanics.
Another example:
Now i want to looks at two different tags that are in my opionion an intersting situation
Hannover and Brunswick.
Brunswick exist in 1444 and usually is the best candidate to form the admin tech 10 nation of Hannover. Historically Hannover is indeed a Kingdom apearing in germany a bit later. But ingame it makes no sense for Brunswick to basically just change their capital and then beeing a mid game nation, especially for the people who got conquered by Brunswick during its way to own all of north western Germany it makes no difference if it is now called Brunswick or Hannover, as it is basically just the capital of the Kingdom.
So my idea would be to have here the same logic as for Aachen. Brunswick owns 4 provinces at the start: Hoya, hannover, Brunswick and Gottingen. If you now lose a war and have to give up Brunswick and Gottingen to Goslar or so and the capital moves to Hannover as it the next highest developed provinces you technically already became Hannover.
So if a city bound Tag changes it capital (however that happens) there should be the option to create a new nation out of it, either a historical ingame one (Brunswick -> Hannover, Cologne -> Paderborn) or simply a new generated one, you decide what name exactly and what flag, etc.
and i repeat, only the option should be there, i know there are many examples of realms named after cities that sometimes lost control of said city and did use some other city as their capital, but i think it could be interesting to have a very light version oft he custom nation editor during the the running game.
At first just to uinderstand some limitations of this whole mechanic i kinda sorted all the nations into 4 categories.
| Tier | name | description | example |
| Tier IV | Cultural Union Tags | Tags that are basically meant to be the union of a whole cultural group (or atleast most of it) | Germany, Italy, Russia Spain, Scandinavia |
| Tier III | Cultural Tags | Tags that are meant to be the only representant of a specific culture within a culture group | France, Prussia, England, swabia, ottoman Empire, Greece, Austria, Poland, etc |
| Tier II | Sub cultural tags | Tags that share their culture with other tags around them and are not directly meant to be the sole representant of this culture (could be merged with Tier 1 but i want to say something special about those below later) | Württemberg, Karaman, Mazowia, Lorraine |
| Tier I | City Tags | Tags that are/should be technically bound to a specific city/provinc or are named after a city/provinces | Aachen, Brunswick, Hannover, Anhalt, Hamburg, Bremen |
So by now it should be possible for a future paradox game to really play around with flags and their customination and combination. and i think with that it would be quite intersting to make integrating personal Unions a bit more unique instead of just annexing them. i will talk about the limitations later more in detail but here are some examples before i go more in detail:
1. There are limits of PUs you can show on your flag/name
2. Depending on your size and Tier you are only allowed to intergrate specific countries in this special way
Example: Swabia:
Swabia is the nation meant to be a unified realm of all swabian provinces (and of course of the historical swabian kingdom). So it should be not possible for it to form a union like Swabia-Wurttemberg. so if you are a Tier III nation you should not be able to create unions with Tier I, Tier II and Tier IV (Germany-Swabia makes no sense aswell) nations of the same exact culture (culture group for Tier IV nations) as that would lead to a redundant Union another example would be: Poland-Mazowia (shouldnt be possible as Poland is already meant to be a union for all polish cultural provinces) or France-Orleans. I think you get the point i am trying to make here.
it would be still possible to create unions with nations of other cultures, no matter the tier (e.g. Polish and any germany cultured nation)
or with nations within the same culture group but different culture. (within german culture for example Swabia and bavaria).
here are some more example of what i mean with that all:
So as you can see Poland-Bohemia would be possible as poland has no natural claim to be also the unified country for czech/bohemian people. Moravia would be just a tier lower.
But stuff like Poland-Krakow would not work as krakow and poland are both polish but poland is already the country for all poles, i guess it should be clear now what i mean
Limitations:
Obviously this mechanic needs limitations. You can have as manys PUs as before but the special option to integrate your Junior partner like that should be limited.
- You cant integrate more then 3 or 4 nations like that
- The nation you try to integrate like that needs to have either more dev than you or not less then half the dev of you (just as an example)
- Additionally the Tier limitation i mentioned abobe: so stuff like Poland-krakow, Germany-Swabia, Italy-Venetia cant happen
If you have a valid PU for this mechanic there will be 2 options for you too choose from.
- Complete integration
- This option will simply completly annex the target country, the target provinces in that case could get national unrest and nationalism as a temporary modifier
- Integration with autonomy
- This option will end up in the mechanic i am talking about here. I will go further into details about what happens after you are done in the next step, but instead of national unrest and nationalism you could get just high amount of autonomy in the target province
- and finally:
Effects:
Flags:
As shown above after integrating a country like that your flags are getting merched together (historical examples for examples are Spain and Poland-Lithuania)
Or just let the user design an own flag in an editor like for custom nations or so? i think paradox could offer just multiple options for the user to choose from.
Name:
It should be clear that in this case the name of your country would also change and i think the game could give the player some preset options to choose from
- Keep your Name (Castille is doing this with Leon)
- Root.Nation–Target.Nation
- (Swabia-Bavaria)
- (Austria-Spain)
- Root.NationAdj–Target.NationAdj + Government Rank
- (Swabian-Bavarian Kingdom)
- (Austrian-Spanish Empire)
- DynastieName + Government Rank
- (Wittelsbach Kingdom)
- (Habsburg Empire)
- Custom Name (maybe just give the player the option to name his new empire?)
Claims:
For this topic i kinda created that Tier system in the first place in my head to make it a bit more understandable.
example: Poland-Germany and Poland Swabia
Poland should already have claims on all polish provinces, as soon as it gets the PU over Germany and integrated it, it will inherit Germanys claim on all german cultural provinces aswell (mission tree claims are ignored). If it was just Swabia they inherited, then they get claims on all swabian provinces, etc.
these claims are only working for Tier III and Tier IV countries, Tier II (e.g. Wurtemberg) and Tier I (e.g Ulm) wont really give Poland any extra claims, besides their original cores.
What if…?
- You lose control of the original land of your integrated Junior Partner?
- To answer this i would actually take an ingame example to explain my idea. At the moment if you win a war against castille and release Leon, castille automatically keeps its castille-Leon flag and nothing more special happens to that. So my idea would be that Castile would already start with Leon as an integrated Junior Partner in the game files, that means if the total limit of PUs you can integrate like that is 4, you can right at the beginning in 1444 only integrate 3 more if you play as castille. This means the flag you can see on castille in 1444 is already one of those above generated flags.
if it now loses leon, there can be 2 options,- Castille keeps its claim to he leon throne (as a CB and on its flag). This is kinda what England did with France, while they had no controll over all of France they still kept their claim visible on their flags while France itself existed.
- Castille gives up or loses its claim to the leon throne. This wont create a „claim throne“ CB and Castilles Flag will be reset to their orginal flag that only shows their part (yellow castle on red background)
- To answer this i would actually take an ingame example to explain my idea. At the moment if you win a war against castille and release Leon, castille automatically keeps its castille-Leon flag and nothing more special happens to that. So my idea would be that Castile would already start with Leon as an integrated Junior Partner in the game files, that means if the total limit of PUs you can integrate like that is 4, you can right at the beginning in 1444 only integrate 3 more if you play as castille. This means the flag you can see on castille in 1444 is already one of those above generated flags.
- You integrate a Junior Partner that also already integrated one.
- First of all i would personally not allow AI to use this mechnic at all but in case it would happen like that i would say that your count of integrated PUs goes up by the amount of nations your Junior Partner integrated. So if you are Poland-Saxony-Bohemia (count of 2) and you integrate now Lithuania-Russia-Hungary (count of 3 as lithunia counts also as 1 for you) it would move you up to 5, which with a limit of 4 isnt allowed, so the game would simply either delete the latest nation joining your union (in this case hungary) forming Poland-Saxony-Bohemia-Lithuania-Russia or they really just count the original country, in this case Lithunia -> Poland-Saxony-Bohemia-Lithuania (btw here you can see why maybe a limit of 3 would be good as it would allow exactly 4 nations to be displayed on the flag)
National Ideas:
One thing i thought could be really interesting is that if you inherit a country you can choose to replace some of your national ideas with your Junior partner ones.
example: Austria-hungary:
In this case i took 4 ideas of Austria and 3 ideas of hungary to create the Austrian-Hungarian Ideas. It maybe sounds a bit too op at first to simply beeing able to choose ideas just like that but here should be obviously also limitations:
- Taking 3 ideas of your Junior Partner is maybe too much, even though i think the resulting Austrian-Hungarian Ideas arent really „too good“ or somewhat game breaking. But technically it can be of course limited to just 1 or 2 ideas you can take per Junior Partner.
- To limit it even further, the postion of the ideas can be fixed to a certain place. If you want hungarys 4th idea you have to sacrifice austrias 4th idea for it. So you cant choose replace any weak idea with a good one if the order is different.
- You cant take ideas with the same effects. If for example Hungary has at its 3rd Idea „Moral of army +10%“ and Austria has as its 5th idea (moral of army +5%) you can choose to take the hungarian idea and replace austrias 3rd idea with it, but it will also replace austria 5th idea with hungarys 5th idea to avoid the player from stacking up such modifiers and end up with „Moral of army +15%“ in 2 ideas
Bonus thoughts about Tier 1 nations:
City tags should have a unique relationship to their main/capital/home province.
Example: If Aachen conquers the whole rhineland and establishes a small empire but then after a war it loses the provinces of Aachen to France or so, should it still be called Aachen? i think no. Even their national ideas strictly refers to the city itself so technically it makes no sense that the nation of Aachen keeps its name and ideas like „Charlemagnes capital“ if they actually dont own it anymore. Things like that should be maybe handled by province modifiers in the future or atleast influenced by it
| YES | NO |
| Yes it can, but only if it keeps a permanent claim on this province, which also leads to a heavy negative opinion modifier with the current owner of the province of Aachen This should be also just an option for Aachen to choose from, if for example France conquers the city and the nation of Aachen still exist in Julich for example which they conquered some years ago there should be simply the option to set up a new legacy as Julich and give up Aachen to avoid any negative effects with France | If they not only lose the province but it gets forced to revoke any claim to the city it should definetly also have to change its name |
This could be handled with a similar system like the native american federations or setting up a satelite state or even a light version of custom nations, your new standard name will be your current capital and a random flag appears that you can change like in the previous mentioned mechanics.
Another example:
Now i want to looks at two different tags that are in my opionion an intersting situation
Hannover and Brunswick.
Brunswick exist in 1444 and usually is the best candidate to form the admin tech 10 nation of Hannover. Historically Hannover is indeed a Kingdom apearing in germany a bit later. But ingame it makes no sense for Brunswick to basically just change their capital and then beeing a mid game nation, especially for the people who got conquered by Brunswick during its way to own all of north western Germany it makes no difference if it is now called Brunswick or Hannover, as it is basically just the capital of the Kingdom.
So my idea would be to have here the same logic as for Aachen. Brunswick owns 4 provinces at the start: Hoya, hannover, Brunswick and Gottingen. If you now lose a war and have to give up Brunswick and Gottingen to Goslar or so and the capital moves to Hannover as it the next highest developed provinces you technically already became Hannover.
So if a city bound Tag changes it capital (however that happens) there should be the option to create a new nation out of it, either a historical ingame one (Brunswick -> Hannover, Cologne -> Paderborn) or simply a new generated one, you decide what name exactly and what flag, etc.
and i repeat, only the option should be there, i know there are many examples of realms named after cities that sometimes lost control of said city and did use some other city as their capital, but i think it could be interesting to have a very light version oft he custom nation editor during the the running game.
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