If you are not aware, you only need >20% literacy in a pop for them to promote to clerks, machinists or engineers. That is obviously very low. If you don't have people to set up factories, manage and maintain them it shouldn't be possible for these factories to run. That is what this is about not how literate average laborer was.
Tbh I don’t fully understand how the qualification system works. As you say it seems that there’s a minimum literacy that a certain pop needs so members of it qualify for these professions. There’re other factor like wealth and current (and previous?) profession, that together with literacy determine how many members of that pop get qualified each month. Until here is all clear, but then what happens? The number of qualified people increases until the maximum of members of that pop, so everyone in that pop qualifies? I understand that should not be the case, but not sure.
As I see it, (and assuming that just literacy is what’s needed for these jobs), it should work the other way around. Literacy, instead of a lower limit, should be a ceiling. No more than 20% of the pop members should qualify if literacy is 20% (actually a higher percentage of members should qualify if we are measuring also literacy of dependents). But if only 10% is literate, why that 10% shouldn’t qualify?
And tbh 20% of the population qualified to be engineers should be more than enough not to have any worker shortages even in the most technological economy. Which illustrates that we should be taking into account higher education and not just literacy for these qualifications. But that’s another hill to die on.
I think there are a number of reasons I don't feel like the political simulation represents any meaningful change, at least lensed through the IG system:
Tbh I’m not super fan of the IG system. I have come to accept it though.
Pops themselves don't believe anything (or at least, not in a way that is visible to the player - they can back some revolutionary movements); just being told that there are people who believe stuff, and here is what they believe, is I think a core part of a political-mechanical fantasy to me. I've genuinely considered "testing" myself to see if I just renamed the IG groups to political identities through a mod (like "Reactionary conservatives" for landowners, or whatever) to see if that changes my narrative reading of the political simulation
Well they also support political movements (although seem a bit random to me). And you could consider that their support to IGs align with what they believe, although it is too connected to their profession. I understand why they did this though, aside from being more or less plausible to a certain degree, it connects the society make up with politics and vice-versa in an easy to understand way. Maybe they add more factors to determine support of pops to IGs in the future.
The agents who do believe stuff, the interest groups, barely change what they believe over the period: landowners (and even "reactionary conservative landowners"!) absolutely did not believe the same stuff in 1836 as in 1936. Their numbers changing (and growing political engagement which tbf is modelled) does not meaningfully encapsulate the kind of changes that happened within populations of the same "type" within this period.
I have hope that they develop this in the future. After all they have said that early iterations had IGs not being static and changing their approach to certain issues. But they said it was too confusing to the player, so they went to more fixed ideologies, using the leader’s ideology to represent some changes. But this is generally random, and it comes and goes with the leaders themselves. There’re a couple of scripted changes I think, but yes generally they are quite static.
That being said, for your example of the landowners you could consider that this change is represented by the change of who the landowners are. By late game, several of your landowners will be Capitalist supporting different IGs and ideologies than early game landowners. This logic can be generalized to other demographic groups.
Those agents are mediated through the IG group leaders, which gives the whole thing a feeling of the same kind of "elite" politics in 1836 as in 1936. The idea that there was a meaningfully identifiable leader of the dispossessed urban artisans in the 1848 revolutions in each country, and that figure could have been invited into government, seems mad to me.
I kind of enjoy the leaders. To me it makes it feel like there’s people behind all that. I see them just as politicians that support different ideologies, so I’m fine with them.
Not so much a change point but a sophistication one - you're obviously right that which IGs matter at game-start and game-end are different; but if, say, only 4 IGs are relevant at any one time, isn't that a rather obtusely simplistic political simulation?
I’m mostly ok with it, but granted is a matter of taste. We lack some stuff though, like IGs for different faiths or regional or cultural IGs.
As I said before I was not very thrilled with IGs. Having political groups with these names is a bit off-putting and all is tied too much with professions. But after playing I have come to terms with it. I find the political gameplay of Vic3 more involved and dynamic than that of Vic2 (although probably something similar could have been achieved without IGs). They also added political parties that helps with immersion and I hope they develop the system a bit more in the future adding more factors to determine support to IGs and other stuff. But at the same time I understand why you don’t like it, because I share some of the gripes.
