Dynamic Culture & Religion

[greller]

Here's an idea that would probably involve its own expansion, since it requires a major reworking of current features: culture and religion in provinces should not be homogeneous, and they should shift dynamically over time. Each province would have percentages of each culture and religion present, and there would be various pressures to increase or decrease the percentages over time.

A variety of factors would cause a culture or religion to become more dominant in a province: whether bordering provinces have that culture/religion, whether it is the dominant culture/religion in the state, whether you have a missionary present in the province (I think missionaries should be re-purposed to also act as cultural ambassadors, giving a bonus to growth of the primary culture in a province; this could be done at the same time as religious conversion or it could be implemented as two different tasks that a missionary can do when you deploy him). Every religion and culture would have a modifier based on these factors, so they can push against each other to determine what grows and what shrinks.

For example, take a province that's 70% Occitan, 30% Francien. Maybe Occitan is spreading at +10 because all the neighboring provinces are Occitan, but Francien being the primary culture gives +5 and a missionary spreading culture gives another +5, leaving the province balanced. Of course, if the province is 60% Occitan, 30% Francien and 10% Basque, the fact that Francien and Occitan are +10 means that the small Basque minority will slowly disappear over time. Various balancing factors could be implemented (e.g. "embattled minority" event gives a bonus to a group that is currently between 5% and 10%) so that small cultures aren't automatically wiped out, but over time cultures would shift based on where they're tolerated and where they're not. The existence of a homeland could also give a bonus, to reflect the fact that a Swiss minority in France is going to be more likely to hold on to their cultural identity if they know that there's a powerful Swiss state out there (currently implemented as a hard block on conversions if the national state exists, which is bulky and unrealistic).

In all of this, religion would essentially be treated the same as culture, except that the spread rates would be higher, allowing for bigger shifts. It may take 100 years for a province to stop considering itself Sicilian (and even that is only if you really push), but religious conversion can happen in less than a generation if you're aggressive about it. Maybe some integration of the religious unity and accepted cultures mechanisms would also make sense, reflecting the overall diversity or uniformity of the state.

 

[Grand Historian]

I agree we need a way to represent more than one culture/religion per province, but this seems a bit to similar to Total War with a flare of CKII's lackluster culture/religious shifts. To reiterate a post I've quoted countless times on this;

"I've seen a few suggestions on how EU4 can simulate population/having more than one culture/religion per province, but in my opinion they border too much on Vicky territory and are probably too complex to implement. So, I would like to put forth what I think would be a somewhat more simple suggestion: expand basetax.

To borrow a leaf from Civ's book, essentially my suggestion is that each point of basetax is essentially it's own population group, and can have it's own religion and culture, each displayed in a new 'Population' screen that can branch off from the regular provincial window, where you can also can direct which basetax you want to convert, and the majority culture/religion of a province becomes that province's religion and culture. Now, with 1.12, of course, there needs to be some expounding given the new mechanics.

For starters, this would obviously have a noticeable impact on how conversions are handled. Before I touch on that, I would actually like to advocate returning to the original pre-1.12 system of conversions, in which each basetax accounted to -0.5 Missionary Strength. Why? Well, the new way of handling conversion (taking the entire development of a province) doesn't make much sense. Production is meant to simulate how much industrial infrastructure a province has to support the cultivation of it's resource, and manpower represents how many able-bodied men you can draft from a province. Basetax represents the entire population. So I don't really see why a Missionary should have to take into account proselytizing to a province's infrastructure or a small pool of people (that are still represented by basetax) when he's sent to convert the general population.

Now for the suggestion of how conversions could be handled in light of this. Let's use Smyrna for a hypothetical example; a five basetax province. Say it has three Sunni Basetax and two Orthodox Basetax, and you're an Orthodox Nation. So, you send a missionary, who initially deals with -1.5% Missionary Strength due to basetax, but still converts the specific basetax you sent him to convert. Then, you send him again, but because there's one less Sunni basetax, he only has to deal with -1.0% Missionary Strength this time. This somewhat simple system would add in so much more dynamism, and give you more to do. A similar system can be applied to culture conversion: for every basetax that is a certain culture in a province, it costs an increment of 25 Dip points to convert it (it technically already does that, but it decrease by 25 each time a conversion is accomplished).

Now, obviously there's another big question that needs to be addressed: what culture and religion would a new basetax become? Well, my suggestion for it is a dice roll based on the proportion of the culture/religion in the province. Let's use Albania for example: Albania has four basetax: hypothetically two Albanian/Orthodox, one Albanian/Sunni, and one Venetian/Catholic. So, if the basetax of Albania is increased, then there is a 75% chance the new basetax's culture will be Albanian, 25% Venetian, and a 50% chance it will be Orthodox, 25% chance Catholic and 25% chance Sunni.

So yes, while this proposed system is pretty simple in comparison to many suggestions or Vicky's Pop system, I think it can work the best and be the least clunky. Simulating more than one culture/religion per province has been something requested of EU4 for sometime and I hope that this would be a plausible solution to it. Naturally, there can be events that come along with it to simulate the shift of minorities from one province to another in a nation, refugees coming from others, population booms, cultures/religions completely marginalized coming back, cultures converting along with religion and so on. I hope that, all in all, it will add more depth and dynamism to an already great game."

 

[BrokenSky]

This has been suggested many times.

Personally I'd be good with the province culture and religious breakdown split into 10ths. Minorities contributed via tolerance 10% of the bonus/penalty based on the tolerance. Occasionally there would be events where, for example, one of these pops would flip from one group to another. Cultural pops would flip more often to cultures in the same group and accepted cultures. Religions would be both full religions like catholic/protestant and heresies (e.g. Lollard, Puritan).
Colonies would generally have pops distributed on average in a manner close to the development %ages of cultures in the country, with some randomness. Colonies which were taken over would slowly convert pops over time to be more in line with your own colonies. Ideally.

Side not: If a heresy got majority in a province it could flip to being of that heresy. Countries could adopt heresies as state religion (only by being forced by rebels with majority of provinces following, as for heathens). This would give the same penalties/bonuses as the base religion, except that Catholics would get very much reduced papal influence.

But that's my preference.

Either way, a more in depth culture / religion system would be good.

Edit: Grand Historian's Base tax = pop unit works well for this too, but for the problem of ignoring other kinds of development. Hence, rather than using base tax, how about using Development / 3 rounded down?