What is the point of assimilation?

[fr-rein]

Assimilation is a mess atm.

The point of assimilation is to become a part of the nation. This happens with or without discrimination.

One side is the obvious example of New World, US, etc.
The opposite side of it are discriminating societies. Germans discriminated Poles in Reich, leaving them only option to join the ruling group to be promoted into middle and upper classes. French did same + their literacy program did a major job at erasing regional differences. In Russian Empire, many tribal leaders, sheikhs and princes (in Caucasus as example, but colonial German migration was also a factor) basically russified. How did that matter? You could together discrimate against "losers" and reap rewards from them, creating a healthy and strong middle/upper class and capitals.

I fear that this isn't fully fleshed out yet. This kind of internal social dynamic is what needed for it and for assimilation to matter.

 

[Baldamundo]

It's almost completely pointless at the moment, yeah, as far as I understand it. Except for performance reasons - as someone already noticed, it gets rid of a lot of small separate pops, which speeds up the game.

Only actual use-case for it besides performance, as far as I can tell, is if you use a relatively tolerant culture law for most of the game, in order to assimilate pops, and then switch to a more oppressive culture law late-game - to get the bonus authority. But given how slow assimilation is, and how marginal the benefit is, it seems fairly pointless.

It's probably relatively accurate historically, though - it means there's a decent amount of assimilation of migrant populations (especially in the new world), but assimilating existing populations in an area is very difficult, if not impossible. It's a weird thing to model, because historically a lot of states in the period did devote significant resources to trying to assimilate minority groups, but, as someone already mentioned, in most cases it's not very clear that those policies had any real success.

There were a few events present in the game on release (it's possible they've patched them out since, but I think they're still in?), which will only fire when you have discriminated cultures, and they give you a choice between reducing radicalism or increasing assimilation. But you can't assimilate discriminated cultures, so it doesn't make any sense as a choice - which suggests even the dev team didn't all completely understand how the system works.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

Assimilation is a mess atm.

The point of assimilation is to become a part of the nation. This happens with or without discrimination.

One side is the obvious example of New World, US, etc.
The opposite side of it are discriminating societies. Germans discriminated Poles in Reich, leaving them only option to join the ruling group to be promoted into middle and upper classes. French did same + their literacy program did a major job at erasing regional differences. In Russian Empire, many tribal leaders, sheikhs and princes (in Caucasus as example, but colonial German migration was also a factor) basically russified. How did that matter? You could together discrimate against "losers" and reap rewards from them, creating a healthy and strong middle/upper class and capitals.

I fear that this isn't fully fleshed out yet. This kind of internal social dynamic is what needed for it and for assimilation to matter.

I hope there will be a major update of assimilation and discrimination mechanics at some point. There's definitely a need to have different levels of discrimination besides binary, and some more nuanced ways of interacting with minority cultures. Both could go together too, with more lenient or harsh approaches resulting in different levels of discrimination turmoil, and defining effects of the discrimination. There could easily be an option to block the culture from being part of upper strata, or reduce their qualifications, or one to increase assimilation at cost of turmoil -maybe unlocking a slowed down assimilation in homelands too.