Return province: how does it work?

[Gnostek]

I want to add some hre members, and since I'm a horde, I thought the return province would be great. However, when I try to reform yaroslavl, or rostov, and the like, the tooltip says it'd go to muscovy. What are the mechanics behind return province?

P.S: I know I could release them as vassals, but I don't really want to end up with 20 of them. I'd rather release them and add them as tributaries, which does not cost a diplo slot.

 

[gorkem91]

I might be wrong but I think return province is only returns to the country that you take that province

 

[PhoenixG]

I think the order of country that gets return is like alive country with a core, dead country with a core, dead country with the primary culture.

 

[Hessian Mercenary]

I think PhoenixG is kind of right. But primary culture plays a more important role in returning provinces:
- if the primary culture nation is still alive provinces with this culture and a core of the primary nation will always be returned to it instead of reviving dead tags. This seems to be your problem here: if Muscovy is still alive (as primary nation of muscovite culture) and had annexed the smaller nations, you need to kill Muscovy to be able to release the smaller tags via return province
- however If an alive tag has cores on provinces which are not their primary culture and the primary culture nation is dead but has a core on the province, the province will be returned to the dead primary culture nation instead of the alive country (can be easily checked by e.g. Totma and Ustyug provinces: they have muscovite culture and will always be returned to Muscovy, no matter if Novgorod is alive or not). So this is where culture takes precedence over alive or not
- for some cultures the primary culture nation is not alive and does not have any cores at game start, e.g. Prussian. In this case it seems province will be returned to last owner with full core (if both have the same primary culture). Say Livonian Order annexes Teutonic Order and cores the provinces. Then Livonian Order gets annexed by Poland. Provinces with prussian culture will be returned to Livonian Order as last owner. If on the other hand Poland annexes Teutonic Order and cores the provinces, then someone annexes Poland, the prussian culture provinces will be returned to Teutonic Order. Again culture takes precedence. I found an interesting exception though between the prussian culture nations, Riga would always be returned to Riga, even if Livonian or Teutonic Order owned the province last

 

[Gnostek]

this is great, much appreciated