Multiculturalism is way too OP with no drawbacks

[Askorti]

What needs to happen, and I believe devs are already aware of this, is to add discrimination that comes from pops, rather than from the government. All of the laws that we currently have in-game are strictly about discrimination coming from the state. But as we all know, even if the state doesn't discriminate, the people do.
So even on multiculturalism discrimination still needs to happen.
Racial and cultural tensions between pops should definitely be a thing, as a drawback to the society being so diverse.

 

[wilcoxchar]

It's always funny when people complain that making a society people actually want to live in is good and better than making a society people don't want to live in. Like, yes, duh, that's the point.

 

[Blk82]

What needs to happen, and I believe devs are already aware of this, is to add discrimination that comes from pops, rather than from the government. All of the laws that we currently have in-game are strictly about discrimination coming from the state. But as we all know, even if the state doesn't discriminate, the people do.
So even on multiculturalism discrimination still needs to happen.
Racial and cultural tensions between pops should definitely be a thing, as a drawback to the society being so diverse.

I think the underlying problem is confusing discrimination with separatism. "Discrimination" in game terms refers to a minority POP, who has no separatist desires, becoming radical due to laws which limit his civil rights based on religion, race, or ethnicity. (Also, trying to quantify discrimination will turn the game into a war-crimes simulator.) Imagine, for example, a Sephardic Jew living in 1836 England? What legal changes does he want?

Since he is not a separatist, he doesn't want to establish some sort of Neo-Judea in Great Britain. Rather, he wants to be free from legal discrimination. He wants to have the right to vote, serve on juries, be elected to parliament and so on. In other words, he wants separation of church & state and multiculturalism. If he is radicalized by private discrimination, what is his solution? Either he demand more laws protecting him (Anti-Discrimination laws), or he could become a separatist and attempt to establish a Neo-Judea in Britain. The later course of action is absurd. Demanding anti-discrimination laws just moves the in-game problem of multi-culturalism over another step.

However, nationalism and separatism aren't caused by discrimination, low standards of living, and the like. Rather, separatism is fundamentally driven by nationalism. The separatist isn't driven by grievances, but by a desire to live an ethno-state of his own liking, and impose his language and customs upon others.

The underlying factor is ideological legitimacy, and such legitimacy is only tangentially related to the ability of a system to provide good government. The legitimacy of the system can fall with standard-of-living crashes, loss of wars and other national humiliation, and so on, as the promises made by the current system are refuted. But the underlying source of legitimacy is ideological, rather than practical.

However, that being said, I don't know how to implement such a system in-game. Realistically, the Poles, Hungarians, Serbs, Irish, etc should be demanding independence just because. But, such a game wouldn't be fun the play because the player would be stuck with radicals that exist just because. Vic 2 did sort of try to show that realistically. For example, if you take a state, the "rightful" owner will forever be declaring war on you if they think they can win. However, even in that game, there were work-arounds for the player. If you were a high-ranking great power, diplomatic incidents due to separatist movements were slowed down.

 

[$ilent_$trider]

Another issue is that IGs are defined basically by POP job. You don’t have IGs based on culture and you rarely have separatist movements.

 

[durbal]

Victoria 3 doesn't really have culture and especially not under multiculturalism. You just have goblins to throw in your factories. More goblins = better and multiculturalism lures in more goblins.

 

[Kyoumen]

I think it should be way later in the tech tree than it is now, and maybe even should be locked to council republics. (Did anyone do it pre-1936 except the Soviets? Then again council republic is good already so that might break game balance)

The Argentine constitution of 1853 extended equal protection of the law not only to all citizens, but to all inhabitants of any sort (with an eye towards encouraging immigration). The idea represented by multiculturalism is not as unusual or novel as people often think.

Also, unless you're also going to ban anything else ahistorical (such as, say, making Spain a leading industrial or military power starting from 1836, conquering anything even remotely near India without war with the British, playing about half the countries in the game with any goal other than "slightly put off when a European power annexes you", etc), it's pretty indefensible to try to remove the option to put a country on a path to being more tolerant than any managed in real life. There is no reason that should be less valid a goal than reuniting Gran Columbia, forming Grossdeutschland, making Canada a leading industrial power, or what have you.

The problem is that passing one law more or less does this (sometimes two or three laws, depending) when it should be a long-term project like the aforementioned goals. Part of that is the lack of separation of legal discrimination from "on the ground" discrimination (by both individuals and, e.g., police), which is something the devs have acknowledged and plan to rectify.

 

[Luchofeio]

I think it should be way later in the tech tree than it is now, and maybe even should be locked to council republics. (Did anyone do it pre-1936 except the Soviets? Then again council republic is good already so that might break game balance)

What?? Did I understand you correctly? Soviets didnt have discrimination like vic 3 multiculturalism? What???

 

[BPZ1941]

What?? Did I understand you correctly? Soviets didnt have discrimination like vic 3 multiculturalism? What???

National minorities were given their own governmental institutions and fast-tracked to dominate local administration. Although still disproportionately Russian, even the higher echelons had several figures of the other ethnicities. The early Soviet nationality policy is probably the closest to Vic3 multiculturalism there is in the timeframe. That is of course before Stalin decided to deport entire nations to Siberia.

What isn't accounted for however is how their 'federalism' was largely a sham sidestepped by the centralized CPSU and their widespread religious discrimination. But neither centralization nor state atheism are things in this game.

 

[Traslogan]

Yeah Vicky 3 is petrified of anything negative that wouldn't be acceptable to a contemporary liberal. Ethnostates literally just means you kind of dislike people but they still get to exist in your empire no matter where.

 

[Kyoumen]

Yeah Vicky 3 is petrified of anything negative that wouldn't be acceptable to a contemporary liberal. Ethnostates literally just means you kind of dislike people but they still get to exist in your empire no matter where.

Contemporary liberals just love the thought of reintroducing the African slave trade! Apparently!

 

[Luchofeio]

Yeah Vicky 3 is petrified of anything negative that wouldn't be acceptable to a contemporary liberal. Ethnostates literally just means you kind of dislike people but they still get to exist in your empire no matter where.

Sadly, this is somewhat true.

 

[Vernichtere]

I don't know what Israel or the great lines of history have lost here. It's all about game mechanics in relation to cultures and not about whether a multicultural empire can survive or whether Israel is an ethnostate

The main problem with current mechanics is the same problem with internal politics in general. Sometime around 1870 you have reached an optimal state and don't have to change anything anymore. There are no conflicts, except not particularly logical movements that are easy to control. I don't have to decide how to treat conquered peoples, how much autonomy I allow. It is even the case that interim solutions do not make much sense. I always go as far as I can in one direction or the other.

 

[Nephandus]

I am sorry to have to intercede here but discussing game mechanics in this forum is one thing. Derailing this to a discussion if a certain county is an ethnostate and comparable to certain other historical countries belongs more in the OT forum if at all. Therefore I am deleting the posts referring to that.

 

[MatthewP]

Yeah Vicky 3 is petrified of anything negative that wouldn't be acceptable to a contemporary liberal. Ethnostates literally just means you kind of dislike people but they still get to exist in your empire no matter where.

This is such a weird take.

The game has three different kinds of slavery. It has explicit state discrimination the player can opt into. When you’re colonizing a place and the natives object, here are the choices the game offers you:

1) conquer and subjugate them
2) there is no 2.

The devastation of war is shown on the map, and the game tracks how many people die in your wars. The devs recently made a “fix” because capitalists weren’t exploiting the working class enough. They made a fix at the same time to ensure that people in “colonized” territory are appropriately mistreated.

I just don’t know what game you’re playing. I guess the one thing that’s not explicitly modeled is deliberate genocide, which, presumably, is unnacceptable to a wider audience than liberals.

edit: I guess what people are really upset about is that the game models acceptance as being a better choice for a state than discrimination. Well, if that’s your complaint, tough cookies, that’s reality. Overt discrimination got outcompeted IRL.

 

[Askorti]

This is such a weird take.

The game has three different kinds of slavery. It has explicit state discrimination the player can opt into. When you’re colonizing a place and the natives object, here are the choices the game offers you:

1) conquer and subjugate them
2) there is no 2.

The devastation of war is shown on the map, and the game tracks how many people die in your wars. The devs recently made a “fix” because capitalists weren’t exploiting the working class enough. They made a fix at the same time to ensure that people in “colonized” territory are appropriately mistreated.

I just don’t know what game you’re playing. I guess the one thing that’s not explicitly modeled is deliberate genocide, which, presumably, is unnacceptable to a wider audience than liberals.

It has 3 different kinds of slavery, and all of them are inherently worse than freeing the slaves in pretty much all scenarios. There's never a situation in the game where you go "I have a problem, and some slavery would fix it". As a country without slavery, you would never enact slavery outside of some stupid meme run.

The same goes for discrimination. It's pretty much never worth it, whatever incentives it gives are very weak.

As for Colonizing, that's just horrible game design tbh.

Devastation of war is shown on the map, which in 99% of situations you wont even notice, and said devastation pretty much doesn't affect you at all. It has no impact.

It's not that the capitalists weren't exploiting the working class hard enbough, it's that they were raising wages for no reason whatsoever, just because they had money. Complete altruism and an example of trickle-down economics you would only ever find in a capitalist's wet dream.

And again, people in colonies were not only not mistreated before, they actually had significantly higher SoL than the metropolitan areas.

All of these changes and bug fixes aren't increasing suffering, they are merely reigning in bad mechanics and wrong values which lead to the victorian era in Vic3 being some kind of paradise on earth.

 

[Zhetone]

I think slavery is a special case because in this time period, I don't believe any country actually tried to expand slavery, and analysis in hindsight seems to say that slavery is pretty much inherently worse for an economy than, for example, mechanized farming (using the cotton gin at least; maybe it's different if a country has no technology whatsoever)

But the game's very simple meta for policies and having a clear "end state" of laws you want to enact does make the political side of things fairly trivial and boring in my opinion, especially because of how multiculturalism essentially solves all internal political issues in the game

 

[MatthewP]

It has 3 different kinds of slavery, and all of them are inherently worse than freeing the slaves in pretty much all scenarios. There's never a situation in the game where you go "I have a problem, and some slavery would fix it". As a country without slavery, you would never enact slavery outside of some stupid meme run.

The same goes for discrimination. It's pretty much never worth it, whatever incentives it gives are very weak.

Both have upsides. Yes, in most cases their upsides are smaller than their downsides. Should the game sugarcoat this reality to make dead slave owners feel better?

As for Colonizing, that's just horrible game design tbh.

I too think colonization should have more options. But that’s not what the discussion is about. Currently the only option is the repressive one liberals hate, yes?

Devastation of war is shown on the map, which in 99% of situations you wont even notice, and said devastation pretty much doesn't affect you at all. It has no impact.

It actually does, this is just innaccurate.

It's not that the capitalists weren't exploiting the working class hard enbough, it's that they were raising wages for no reason whatsoever, just because they had money. Complete altruism and an example of trickle-down economics you would only ever find in a capitalist's wet dream.

And again, people in colonies were not only not mistreated before, they actually had significantly higher SoL than the metropolitan areas.

All of these changes and bug fixes aren't increasing suffering, they are merely reigning in bad mechanics and wrong values which lead to the victorian era in Vic3 being some kind of paradise on earth.

I don’t know what you’re trying to say here. They weren’t increasing suffering and exploitation, they were just decreasing non-suffering and the lack of exploitation? Ok. Silly semantic games aside, the point is the devs saw that the game mechanics didn’t properly reflect the brutality of the period and immediately took steps to address it. Doesn’t really fit the narrative.

 

[BPZ1941]

It has 3 different kinds of slavery, and all of them are inherently worse than freeing the slaves in pretty much all scenarios. There's never a situation in the game where you go "I have a problem, and some slavery would fix it". As a country without slavery, you would never enact slavery outside of some stupid meme run.

Maybe not, but the ease with which you can outgrow the global resource base makes me go "I have a problem, and some [redacted] would fix it". I haven't seen any other PDX game where the Malthusian trap is a real thing.

I don’t know what you’re trying to say here. They weren’t increasing suffering and exploitation, they were just decreasing non-suffering and the lack of exploitation? Ok. Silly semantic games aside, the point is the devs saw that the game mechanics didn’t properly reflect the brutality of the period and immediately took steps to address it. Doesn’t really fit the narrative.

The way wages worked broke the game. Upper and lower strata pops would for example had little SoL difference, meaning the upper class was dead as a political force by the midgame and the Trade Unions dominated everything everywhere. The high wages would lead to immediate economic collapse when you passed any Minimum Wage laws, because those are a +% increase to wages.

At the same time, passing laws like Welfare or even becoming Communist(!!!) wouldn't noticeably change the economic dynamics, because everyone was already being paid the highest wage possible. You would also see subsistence farmers refuse to take on factory work because they were literally too well-paid by tenant farming.

Without economic inequalities most of the games features are just pointless and either do nothing or entirely break the economy.

 

[Vernichtere]

I don't understand why they immediately switch back to side topics. The thing is that the game is not a perfect simulation and one should not bring suggestions or criticisms based on non-simulated processes.

Or in other words. Formulate what you don't like about the specific game mechanics and what you should do differently.

I brought up a few suggestions that don't require changing the whole game entirely. Yes, I don't particularly like the current political system either, but that's another topic.


I find bureaucracy relatively acceptable as a price when dealing with cultures. I may hire more bureaucrats to integrate the Poles, but maybe not for the small Ainu people. Virtually every people to be integrated costs a flat minimum price, multiplied by the size of the population. Roughly executed as a minimum performance.


Of course I would prefer an administration of the provinces as such. But that requires changes in other areas. I would also prefer national parties. But this also presupposes general changes.

 

[tom5675]

I think the problem is Multiculturalism being able to completely remove all penalties for being a minority culture.

For example, by enacting Multiculturalism, you can make the Irish just as happy as the English, to be ruled by the British Empire.
You can conquer Japan as a European nation, and as long as you have Multiculturalism, they'll be just as content with your rule as they are with their own.
It basically nullifies the desire for independence and self rule by your people in a large empire.

Even with Multiculturalism, minority pops people should still have an increase to radicalism from discrimination, to model their desire for their own homeland and government. That desire doesn't just go away because the government doesn't explicitly discriminate against you in law.

Additional drawbacks could include greater bureaucracy cost for population and institutions in multicultural societies. To model the bureaucratic effort of having to make everything accessible in multiple languages and respectful for multiple cultural norms.

Another drawback for multiculturalism could be a penalty to government legitimacy. Modelling the fact that people will often see governments comprised primarily of foreigners, as less ligitmate than governments of their own culture. And that it's harder to unify a diverse group of cultures around a single government.

If the drawbacks of multiculturalism were better represented, and it was less of a magic "all cultural tension magically ends just because the government wants it to" effect, then it would be less of an automatic choice to always beeline for Multiculturalism.