New technology group mechanics
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What defines this European cultural sphere? What made it special?
Christianity, mainly.
That's the subject of numerous books I'm sure. Why is it important for EU4?
The technology doesn't represent science and research, but implementing those ideas. If you are huge nation, it logically takes more effort to implement such changes.
So then, why was Ethopia not affected by it then? They were the very place in the world were Christianity was adopted as the state religion. Russia was also christian, but they were largely left behind by the world.
What is it about Christianity that made Europe better? (You'll save some time if you just anticipate the next question)
Epic facepalm is epic. Ethiopia was Christian but it was not part of Christendom
This is the same question as above ("What made Europe better?") and is completely out of the scope of this thread, don't you think?
Wait, what? Did you mean not a part of Europe? Then wouldn't that be more important then being Christian then? So would the reason that the Muslims didn't advance tech themselves, or stick with Europe because they were not a part of the geological continent?
Europe and Christendom are synonymous to an extent. Certainly before the colonisation of the New World they were.
Here's a quote!
Are you trying to hint that there's no such thing as Europe or something?
Stop asking stupid questions.
I think you are underestimating the punishing nature of the ahead of time penalty. For example if tech comes every 5 years, and the Muslim nation is at the tech edge that would mean that the Latin nation would be paying +200% for their tech due to the ahead bonus. That completely overshadows the 75% or 80% Muslim tech group.
In EU4 terms this is even clearer, as almost any country can keep up with technology if they think its important (assuming you have average leaders).
If we can't even agree on that then I think its relevent to talk about it here. Let me put some dot points (many places outside Western Europe had some of these, but they are more powerful in combination):
- Using an Alphabet for writing (and its advantages for printing)
- Literacy (particually driven by Protestants encoraged to read the bible)
- Printing, which then feeds back to literacy in a virtuious cycle
- Many small countries (makes it hard for anyone to stop progress) - also leads to competition
- Access to a wide variety of useful plants and animals
- Large % of land is near the coast (encoraging trade - coastal trade was much cheaper than land trade)
- Which leads to advances in shipbuilding & navigation
- Which leads to more naval trade, and then you have a virtious cycle
- Free markets (in places and in comparison to their contemporaries) - feeds back to trade
- Land rights, legal systems, rulers with limited power (provides surity to encorage investment)
- Financial institutions (banks, credit) & accounting (feeds back into trade)
- Western Family system (small family units promoting individual responsiblity)
- Scientific revolution (although that would have a similar list of factors which caused it)
Lots has been written on this topic and different historians will place emphisis on different points. Are you interested in reading about it? Wiki would be a start see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#Possible_factors. However thats a relativly light read, there are also many books which would take all day to read on the topic (or even on one dot point).
Once I get my optimized Western Empire up and running, I generally was able to get my tech to 20-30 years ahead penalty.
This sounds much more reasonable then saying it was because they were christian. It also suggests a possible simple explanation for why the enlightenment was in Europe and not in the Muslim world or China. Around this time, the Ottomans unified the Muslim world, and China was unified for most of this time. They didn't have major rivals nearby them, thus they couldn't benefit from most of the above that they didn't have already.
I could do the same as Oman or the Ottomans.
Who said it was because they were Christian?
No one. He is just asking silly questions. Christianity defined the cultural sphere in Europe and the reason Ethiopia did not join in on it is kind of obvious: They were isolated.
You did. See this:
Fawr gave the correct answer, one which looks at the qualities of the Europeans or Christians rather than assuming that a common denominator with plenty of exceptions was the the root.
Joe did and TheDarkMaster is making him think about his claims, arguably an impossible task. The point he is making seems to be that Europeans succeeded because certain qualities they developed and certain activities they engaged in (See Fawr's list) gave them that potential. Now going back to the point of this thread, should we ignore that and instead make an assumption about these things like Joe has, or should we actually model it so that Europeans can achieve success instead of just being automatically successful.
Additionally, Ethiopia was not very isolated. It had plenty of contact with the Muslim world and sporadic contact with Christendom. The bigger question might be this: If Christianity or Christendom was the defining factor of success, then why did Ethiopia not succeed during this period, despite being both Christian and developing much closer ties with Christendom?
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Looking at the underlined bit I think needs to be done point by point. To start with I'll take this point.
There is nothing special about religious divisions which mean that they couldn't happen in a Muslim nation like the Ottomans. Just like there was a split in christianitity there could have been a split in the religious beliefs of Muslims, and one which encoraged individuality, work ethic and literacy (via everyone reading holy text for themselves). Of course in game that hyperthetical split would create problems for the Ottomans.
It would mean that the Ottomans would need to embrace this new religion. A similar decision to the conversion to protestantism would hit you with a -5 to stability right there. Then they would need to slowly work and convert all their areas, and until they did their stability costs would be through the roof. Then they would find that they were considered heritics by the rest of the Muslim world. Then I can imagine a generation of religious wars while the Ottomans are at their weakest (and dealing with internal revolts due to wrong religion & missionaries), potentially resulting in the Ottomans being forced to give up this new religion. If they survive and prosper at the end of all that then the Ottomans would slowly get increased literacy, bookmaking and then would have one extra factor encoraging growth (out of many dot points). This would either slightly increase their research rate (closing the gap to Western Europe), or be a step on the way towards doing that.
When I compare that to the westernisation decisions which were in EU3, I conclude that the EU3 westernisation was too easy, and didn't have enough drawbacks (in fact it is almost a no-brainer).
30 years ahead of time means you are paying 7 times as much as you have to for technology.
When you are paying that sort of penalty a 15% or 20% penalty for being Muslim/Eastern European becomes trivial. In fact if you transported an empire with those same characteristics to China (with high base tax and valuable trade goods) then you would be ahead of time, even with their base 40% tech rate.
And here is why we started the thread in the first place. In EU3 there were two primary ways of increasing your research speeds: sliders and, if not in the Latin tech group, westernization. There were some flaws in these two systems.
Sliders were there to represent the ethos of your nation. We had two sliders related to technology: Serfdom/Free Subjects and Innovative/Narrowminded. These two sliders encompass much of what you brought up in terms of social and religious traditions. However, in EU3 if you were Latin tech and embraced Serfdom and Narrowminded, you still got the benefit of being in the "innovative and individualistic" group, regardless of whether this actually reflected your nation. On the opposite side, non-Latin tech nations could be entirely Innovative and Free Subjects and still suffer an inherent penalty because they weren't Latin tech.
Westernization, as it exists in EU3, is an odd and largely fictional process. First, the only way it works is by moving you through other tech groups, something that doesn't make a lot of logical sense. The Aztecs, if they westernized, are not going to become Muslims. Second, Westernization happens in big leaps and with minimal effort other than moving sliders. In reality there were often smaller technological shifts and sometimes they had tremendous political, religious, and social effects. Additionally, many of these didn't require decades of political centralization and/or innovative policies to achieve. Often they occurred because of regular contact with a more advanced neighbor.
And here is where the ideas of this thread come into play. The general idea is to avoid the a priori assumption that all Europeans are innovative and individualistic and that all non-Europeans aren't. Instead by looking at these things during the game, we can appropriately allow Europe to fulfill the conditions which allowed its ascendance while simultaneously not forcing every other tech group to exist solely in a state relative to Europe. It's not a huge departure from the EU3 model, but it does have some notable benefits when it comes to increasing the logical consistency of the technology system and the development of gameplay both inside and outside of Europe.
Sliders only represented a small part of what made western Europe's tech increase quickly. For example the most narrowminded protestants were often those who were most interested in reading the bible, and other related religious material, and as a consequence had very high literacy rates. Somewhere like England around 1600 was very narrowminded, but still managed to have significant growth in trade & shipbuilding techniques. Which is because of some of the other factors which aren't represented by sliders. Similarly sliders don't cover family grouping promoting more individual responsiblity (family members in Europe often had less relatives they were culturally obliged to look after).
Of course sliders still had a part to play. Land rights, legal systems and restrictions on the rights of kings are partially represted by the free people's slider. But for everything not represented by sliders they have tech groups.
The system in Vicky 2:AHD was quite good at showing the internal consequences of trying to modernise a state. I think there was a lot more going on than just regular contact with more advanced neighbours though(Why was Japan's experience different to Korea, China or the many states in India)?
EU should take into account the stuff which was different at the game's start (many of my points don't apply to countries like the Ottomans in the 1400s, and very few applied to America or China). Much of the groundwork which lead to the European Divergence from the rest of the world had already taken place by the start of the game, which should provide Western Europeans with many technological advantages at game start.
In 1500 the Palatinate is not just a small rich German country, its a small rich German country which has a lot of embedded reasons why it was able to learn and spread new ideas. These ideas were much harder to change and much more significant than what the innovation slider can represent by itself. But you could say much the same about Milan, Portugal or Denmark in the 1400s.
Still, a lot of these points are rather very ambiguously represented, sometimes not at all, or embodied by those sliders. For example, I would group growing literacy rates and better education into a mix of Free Subjects (individualism and personal betterment) and Innovative (willingness to embrace and implement new ideas). There might be more to it than just those broad categories, but we have to work with the confines of what's available to us. Getting bogged down in levels of detail that the game will never represent is only going to cause us to miss the point.
Japan's experience actually wasn't all that different during this period. The world at this point isn't quite as globalized as in the Vicky period nor was Europe quite as dominant yet. In places like Africa, the Americas, and East Asia we're looking at things like regular long distance trading and occasional military conflicts which bring in these new technologies. There should be moments of technological diffusion and if you choose to embrace them in the long run, then you'll have to deal with some consequences. EU3 currently handles it more like a build up to a moment of instant technological change and immediate, but not long term, consequences. It's really a bit backwards.
I think your use of the word "groundwork" is what's being discussed here. Groundwork implies that something else develops out of that foundation. EU3 currently handles the development, but not much in terms of the foundation. You're given the technological progress, but very little is said of the factors that drove it. As said before, it seems odd that a hypothetical Oman, one which is trading, colonizing, very innovative, promotes individualism, and is exploring the world just like the Europeans, is somehow still inherently less technologically capable than a hypothetical Gotland, one which might ignore commerce and colonization, is very narrowminded, wants to keep the serfs in place, and couldn't care less about the Americas.
Basically, what I'm getting at is that EU3 (not wrongly) presumes, much like you have, that there were factors which pushed Europe ahead. However, EU3's technology system is flawed in a way because those factors are represented both inherently in the predefined research efficiency of each group and dynamically in options and mechanics that we can alter like sliders or ideas. Given that EU3 is game where we can control most of our nation's characteristics, it seems more appropriate to embrace the latter method of modeling technology.
Here is another thing, vanilla EU3 has the reformation an inevitable event, and the effects that it has always happen to Europe as they did historically, regardless of the outcome. So if say, the catholic church remained essentially in complete control of Europe, continuing to enforce that only the church should read the bible, literacy rates in Europe would most likely remain lower then they became in our timeline.
We could certainly apply a literacy rate modifier to each province, similar to how MEIOU handles religious minors, if we wanted to. Then add a bunch of events that modify those rates based on events and decisions that any given nation takes. The average literacy rate within a nation then modifies its chance to trigger a tech rate up event.
We could certainly apply a literacy rate modifier to each province, similar to how MEIOU handles religious minors, if we wanted to. Then add a bunch of events that modify those rates based on events and decisions that any given nation takes. The average literacy rate within a nation then modifies its chance to trigger a tech rate up event.
Uhuh. You know what, I am sure he has thought over the claim and you just have not. Furthermore the claim is true as when the Muslim world lost out on the trade going between Europe and the Far-East, plus the resources brought from the Americas they started to gradually degrade. And they did not get part in all the fun because they were outside the cultural sphere of Europe which was defined by Christianity. Lastly Ethiopia is mostly isolated from other Christians. They are surrounded on all sides by Muslims. Not to mention their version of Christianity is different from the ones that dominated Europe during the time.
I was asking why Europeans were special, and all I got was that it was because they were christiandom and that the concept of why that makes them better is beyond the scope of the thread. Fawr gave a much more satisfying explanation.