What's in a core?

[Lady Lacroix]

So I'll just get the pun that motivated me to actually make this thread out of the way right now. I don't understand the core concept.

What does a 'core' represent? It clearly doesn't represent "Your people's historic heartlands." Or anything similar. Does it just represent your nation's administrative consolidation over the lands? If so, why use the word 'core' which implies centrality and/or importance?

 

[Benghi Bon]

I think of it as your administration taking in that part of the land and considering it a core part of your nation. Not heartland, but just something you consider yours after holding onto it. In the end though it's an abstract concept and I doubt they paid much mind into the historicity of it when they designed that part. It's more or less the result of balancing after very blobby earlier iterations of Europa Universalis. I like coming up with little stories about the whats and whys of abstract gameplay terms though.

 

[pedrito_elcabra]

Short version is that it's there for gameplay purpose only.
The closest would be de jure ownership probably.

Truth is, any real world explanation you try to find for cores will be incomplete, and incongruent with at least half a dozen gameplay mechanics related to cores.

 

[Badesumofu]

How I think of it:
When you occupy something you take physical control of it and can get some few resources from it but not a lot.
When you end the war and become the owner of the province it is now recognized as yours and you can now try to establish a proper administration.
Coring is when you do the above. It is the process of actually installing a functioning administration of a province.

That's not a perfect assessment and it doesn't handle things like cores that persist for 100 years while you don't own the province so well, but it mostly makes sense for how cores are handled in this game. It works okay for OE, though. Imagine the administration of a nation trying to hold on to a load of land (non-militarily) that it hasn't set up an administrative structure in. Occupation doesn't cause OE because it is military-occupation, not a strain on your administration. When the war ends and military goes off to do other things that's when the problems really set in.