Let us first say that culture, is frankly rather boring in the current version of the game. While it does have certain clear impacts and importance, there are often times where culture will simply be ignored because it can be, especially as one grows more and more powerful culture becomes almost irrelevant as gaining new accepted territory becomes impossible and you have to much land to realistically convert it so you must simply ignore it. Not to mention things can just work out silly some times, I once turned all of India to Russian culture purely because I could, it made no sense at all.
I suggest we overhaul culture to be something that you have more ability to interact with, there will be more choices to be made and plans to be drawn, although this also doesn't mean that if you want you can't just ignore culture anyway.
Cultural Acceptance:
It has been suggested to me that cultural acceptance, as it is now, isn't a question of whether or not the people of a culture accept your nation as their rightful ruler but a question of whether or not your government accepts that culture in it. This seems quite backwards to me, for example The Knights start with Rhodes which is Greek but Primary Culture for them is Francien despite that they get cultural acceptance of Greek Culture when really they should face serious issues from the Greeks who would view them as foreign conquerors, which they were. Instead then of a question of how much of your land is of a certain culture, I suggest of the main factors in determining cultural acceptance be how much of a culture's land you control, this way small nations won't gain acceptance via simply taking a small number of provinces, but even large empires can gain acceptance of small cultures like Basque or Irish based on the fact that they control all of said cultures land.
However control of cultural lands can't be the only factor, there are many other factors that would go into the calculation, Cultural similarity, simply put being of the same culture group makes it easier to get a new one accepted, its easier for Saxony a german nation to get Prussian culture accepted than Poland a West Slavic nation.
Existing “home” nation, simply put it is difficult to gain acceptance if there is any existing nation that those people would consider their rightful ruler, for example the Greeks view Byzantium as their nation and will be harder to gain acceptance with so long as Byzantium still exists.
Recent conquest, simply put it ticks down over time but people don't take well to being conquered and will be less kindly deposed to your nation for a period after conquest.
Religious outlook, if your nation and a culture don't share a religion they are less likely to accept you, this is harsher for heretics instead of just heresy but also its designed to make it harder to deal with such religious differences as you will have to convert the majority of the culture through the unaccepted culture malus before you can alter the cultures acceptable religions.
Miscellaneous factors, anything else that didn't fall into the other categories, for example Czech people will have an HRE member disposition, which will make it easier for fellow HRE states to gain acceptance from them even though they are a different culture group than most of the HRE, this would also hamper a non HRE state that has taken HRE land from gaining acceptance from the people there. Other various factors would mildly alter various cultures toward one thing or another, Japanese culture might have a malus toward any non Japanese nation gain acceptance to represent the pro Japanese and anti foreign movements that exists even back then in Japan. This might also include things such as events of a war, if an area is damaged in a war or starved via blockade its people might feel you are not protecting them and maybe grow angry with you over it, some suggesting that you have no right to rule over them if you don't protect them.
Final notes, for now at least I don't suggest a changing of the way Primary Culture work or Cultural Union, they will just always be accepted and the maluses for wrong culture will likely stay the same as well. Although I might suggest a “cultural union mechanic” simply put if you are an empire of 1000 development and there is no existing union for your culture group and you don't already have a union you can declare your nation home of all people of your culture group and make a cultural union. This is just a little idea, but I think it would be nice, especially in various parts outside of Europe, where they don't have formable nations with cultural unions.
Cultural Conversion:
I don't have much to say on this, I think it should be possible but I think we should further discourage it as an optimal strategy, so I suggest that when you culturally convert a place, it will lose an amount of development, and that development will be moved via event to another province outside your nation, they will prefer provinces of their culture, then culture group and if nothing else they just wanna get out of your country as fast as possible.
Colonial Culture:
I'm going to touch on this briefly, there have been many suggested ideas about colonial culture and while I dislike how the Americas end up full of English and Castilians and such, I honestly can't think of an idea that I feel would impact game play enough to be warranted, yes it would be cool if there were Americans or Colombians or Mexicans living in your colonies and they were part of your culture group, but I really can't see how this actually would impact the game in a serious way. Its a shame because its kinda stupid the way it works now but the issues is I feel like putting any effort into changing it would almost be wasted work since people won't really notice the difference.
TLDR: Cultural Acceptance should be something that can be worked with, with clear reasons for why a people refuse to accept your rule, it should allow you to form goals, for example you own some Venician land but they aren't accepted if you go in and look at why they aren't accepted it will tell you they are upset over the conquest, they see Venice as their rightful nation, you only own 20% of all Venician land and you are Protestant while most Venician are Catholic. This give clear reason for the lack of acceptance and would give a weight to each one, I'm not even gonna suggest number here I'm not a game balancer, as well as possible way to fix this issue and at least an idea of how close you can get to acceptance by doing these various tasks
I suggest we overhaul culture to be something that you have more ability to interact with, there will be more choices to be made and plans to be drawn, although this also doesn't mean that if you want you can't just ignore culture anyway.
Cultural Acceptance:
It has been suggested to me that cultural acceptance, as it is now, isn't a question of whether or not the people of a culture accept your nation as their rightful ruler but a question of whether or not your government accepts that culture in it. This seems quite backwards to me, for example The Knights start with Rhodes which is Greek but Primary Culture for them is Francien despite that they get cultural acceptance of Greek Culture when really they should face serious issues from the Greeks who would view them as foreign conquerors, which they were. Instead then of a question of how much of your land is of a certain culture, I suggest of the main factors in determining cultural acceptance be how much of a culture's land you control, this way small nations won't gain acceptance via simply taking a small number of provinces, but even large empires can gain acceptance of small cultures like Basque or Irish based on the fact that they control all of said cultures land.
However control of cultural lands can't be the only factor, there are many other factors that would go into the calculation, Cultural similarity, simply put being of the same culture group makes it easier to get a new one accepted, its easier for Saxony a german nation to get Prussian culture accepted than Poland a West Slavic nation.
Existing “home” nation, simply put it is difficult to gain acceptance if there is any existing nation that those people would consider their rightful ruler, for example the Greeks view Byzantium as their nation and will be harder to gain acceptance with so long as Byzantium still exists.
Recent conquest, simply put it ticks down over time but people don't take well to being conquered and will be less kindly deposed to your nation for a period after conquest.
Religious outlook, if your nation and a culture don't share a religion they are less likely to accept you, this is harsher for heretics instead of just heresy but also its designed to make it harder to deal with such religious differences as you will have to convert the majority of the culture through the unaccepted culture malus before you can alter the cultures acceptable religions.
Miscellaneous factors, anything else that didn't fall into the other categories, for example Czech people will have an HRE member disposition, which will make it easier for fellow HRE states to gain acceptance from them even though they are a different culture group than most of the HRE, this would also hamper a non HRE state that has taken HRE land from gaining acceptance from the people there. Other various factors would mildly alter various cultures toward one thing or another, Japanese culture might have a malus toward any non Japanese nation gain acceptance to represent the pro Japanese and anti foreign movements that exists even back then in Japan. This might also include things such as events of a war, if an area is damaged in a war or starved via blockade its people might feel you are not protecting them and maybe grow angry with you over it, some suggesting that you have no right to rule over them if you don't protect them.
Final notes, for now at least I don't suggest a changing of the way Primary Culture work or Cultural Union, they will just always be accepted and the maluses for wrong culture will likely stay the same as well. Although I might suggest a “cultural union mechanic” simply put if you are an empire of 1000 development and there is no existing union for your culture group and you don't already have a union you can declare your nation home of all people of your culture group and make a cultural union. This is just a little idea, but I think it would be nice, especially in various parts outside of Europe, where they don't have formable nations with cultural unions.
Cultural Conversion:
I don't have much to say on this, I think it should be possible but I think we should further discourage it as an optimal strategy, so I suggest that when you culturally convert a place, it will lose an amount of development, and that development will be moved via event to another province outside your nation, they will prefer provinces of their culture, then culture group and if nothing else they just wanna get out of your country as fast as possible.
Colonial Culture:
I'm going to touch on this briefly, there have been many suggested ideas about colonial culture and while I dislike how the Americas end up full of English and Castilians and such, I honestly can't think of an idea that I feel would impact game play enough to be warranted, yes it would be cool if there were Americans or Colombians or Mexicans living in your colonies and they were part of your culture group, but I really can't see how this actually would impact the game in a serious way. Its a shame because its kinda stupid the way it works now but the issues is I feel like putting any effort into changing it would almost be wasted work since people won't really notice the difference.
TLDR: Cultural Acceptance should be something that can be worked with, with clear reasons for why a people refuse to accept your rule, it should allow you to form goals, for example you own some Venician land but they aren't accepted if you go in and look at why they aren't accepted it will tell you they are upset over the conquest, they see Venice as their rightful nation, you only own 20% of all Venician land and you are Protestant while most Venician are Catholic. This give clear reason for the lack of acceptance and would give a weight to each one, I'm not even gonna suggest number here I'm not a game balancer, as well as possible way to fix this issue and at least an idea of how close you can get to acceptance by doing these various tasks
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