More Melting Pot Cultures

[Kainser]

I think hard-coding melting pots is a step backwards when the Religion/Faith system is so dynamic. I think it'd be neat if any culture combination in the game had a chance to form a melting pot if a county is held for 50 - 100 years by a ruler of a foreign culture. The new culture could be automatically generated from combining the name lists and clothing options from the parent cultures, with the cultural group coming from the county's original culture to make assimilating neighbouring lands easier.

Historical melting pots like English and Norman should still be hard-coded, but the above would allow for a lot of possibilities like the Timurids forming a Persian-Turkish culture or the Vikings forming a Finno-Swedish culture.

I have posted about this before but I genuinely don't think that the people asking for this have thought about how hard it would be to make "dynamic melting pots" not a complete joke no matter how neat you think it would be. I'm going to use English as an example of an existing hardcoded culture and then compare with how it would work if it was dynamic.

* In the hardcoded example we have a norse character ruling over a french area becoming norman. Norman character then rules over anglosaxon area and becomes English, having names and other features (retinues in CK2 for example) that doesn't come from any of the original cultures.

* If it was dynamic instead we would have a norse character ruling a french area becoming Franco-norse (???), a Franco-norse character then ends up in an anglosaxon province and becomes Anglosaxon-french-norse (?????). Characters of this abomination of a culture would then have children named Aethelbald, Hrolfr and Louis instead of anything remotely close to actual English names. This is what all dynamic cultures would look like.

Further concerns include:

* what will happen when someone of this culture then ends up somewhere else like in Ireland? Will the cultures just keep blending? What happens to the names then?
* how to handle dynamic suffixes/affixes in names of cultures?
* how do you make the game not inevitably end up filled with tiny blended cultures like Breton-French, Anglosaxon-Welsh or German-Bohemian? Will the middle-east end up as Arabic-Greek in 90% of all games? What happens when Lithuanian crusaders then conquer Jerusalem? Sweden held Finland for 500 years without Finnish and Swedish culture forming a true melting pot. There is a reason these things didn't happen historically.


How exactly do you suggest fixing all this without Paradox inventing a dynamic name generator for hypothetical cultures which sounds beyond current technology? The only rational way to handle this imo is for Paradox to include a small handful of historical melting pots that did happen and then leave it to modders to create hundreds of hypothetical ones if they really want an Irish-Tibetan culture.

 

[Tschobo]

I have posted about this before but I genuinely don't think that the people asking for this have thought about how hard it would be to make "dynamic melting pots" not a complete joke no matter how neat you think it would be. I'm going to use English as an example of an existing hardcoded culture and then compare with how it would work if it was dynamic.

After fiddling with modding a bit in the past month I agree with you and have to change my opinion on that (I was pro-dynamic when I wrote that). Dynamic melting pots would be a horror to implement. It is not impossible, but still extremely tough. And there are questions over questions. Which tech will be chosen, how the AI shall react, should they be able to get all the melting pots, or just the historical ones, which naming conventions will be chosen, which clothes. How will courtiers look. There are many questions which each melting pot and I say it would probably be better to concentrate on historical ones as well as some alt-history ones for some events.

 

[ArVass]

What is with everybody wanting an Anglo-Norse melting pot? xd

 

[Tschobo]

What is with everybody wanting an Anglo-Norse melting pot? xd

Probably for alt-history, at least its for me. As a what-if-scenario if the norse control of the specific english regions would have taken longer and had more influence than it had back then.

But it would be a bit weird and anglo-centric as there were territories with longer foreign control where their actual culture was still alive and thriving over centuries.

 

[Aquamancer]

What is with everybody wanting an Anglo-Norse melting pot? xd

To represent the assimilation of the Norse settlers in Danelaw to the Anglo-Saxon society, while also showing their distinctive impact to the culture of the lands they settled. Basically, they would be to the Anglo-Saxons what the Norse-Gaels/Ostmen are to the Irish, or the Normans are to the French.

 

[Drazer]

I think a generic dynamic melting pots probably wouldn't be that great as other have said. Ideally, we want new culture to have meaning and something unique about then.

Now, I dont think we should have just historical melting pots. I would even suggest some melting pots that are simply silly, but offer a ton of fun: Roman (the revival of roman culture is already in CK2), Macedon, Punic, etc.

 

[DreadLindwyrm]

I think a generic dynamic melting pots probably wouldn't be that great as other have said. Ideally, we want new culture to have meaning and something unique about then.

Now, I dont think we should have just historical melting pots. I would even suggest some melting pots that are simply silly, but offer a ton of fun: Roman (the revival of roman culture is already in CK2), Macedon, Punic, etc.

I'd prefer the plausible (historic/quasi-historic) ones first.

 

[Tschobo]

I'd prefer the plausible (historic/quasi-historic) ones first.

The have already confirmed many historic ones. Of couse first and foremost historic ones should be added and we will see how many and how they implemented it.

After that I would go for plausible ones. Certain melting pots that could be plausible if the history went a different way. Also some things like the Outremer for alt-history (yes I would differentiate the Outremer-culture but it really depends on how the culture and naming convention works).

And somewhere a line would need to be drawn. To a) keep the AI in check and b) to not oversaturate it. The melting pots should be able to be formed where it historically happened and some alt-history cases where it seems plausible that something like that would have happened without one culture dominating the other.

 

[Geodynamis]

For an Outremer melting pot, I think the naming lists should draw from the a blend of of Latin and Arabic names (not just French). Also, Outremer courtiers should probably look Middle Eastern...

 

[ArVass]

It should have predominantly Christian names in (some simplified version of, eg. Vulgar) Latin, yes, with Arabic, Muslim names mixed in with the same orthography.

 

[Doctor Baby]

Maybe it could work if the game just asked the player to pick a name, name list, clothing options, body options like skin tone etc, cultural troops, whatever other unique stuff there is- kind of like reforming religion but more freeform. I imagine 90% of use cases in this are for players who start with one culture and conquer a lot of another, since the AI doesn't do it that often without converting or losing the land to locals eventually. As much as I enjoy that idea, it would still come a lot lower than having the historical melting pot cultures work well in the base game.

 

[SMiki Lorebringer]

Hear me out.

Latino melting pot when Aztecs conquer Iberia

 

[SMiki Lorebringer]

And then you get into ethnicity, which cannot be ignored as newly generated characters of your new melting pot need to have some sort of set ethnicity to use. So do you just use the dominant culture's ethnicity?
Or do they use a blend of the two ethnicities? That assumes that there even is a blend of every ethnicity, in CK2 there were numerous different blends used for different ethnicities breeding, but many were too close that the children just use one or the other.
Or do you use the After the End system where you put both ethnicities within the new culture?

CK3 has DNA system, ethnicity coding would be probably the easiest part of melting pots – just make the generated character inherit roughly equal number of genes from each ethnicity blended. Contrary to name lists, it's something that computer would handle perfectly fine.

 

[Battlex]

I'd like to see the main European cultures divided into smaller regional cultures, i.e. instead of Italian have Tuscan, Venetian, Neapolitan, Calabrese, etc. and have a melting pot start to happen dynamically late game if one culture because the "dominant" in this case Italian culture however that's determined. It would better reflect the medieval perception of culture and nationality and the early emergence of nationhood starting in the 14th century.

Can you please explain how Calabrese is a distinct culture?