Why is manual promotion of pops hated?

[Johan]

Manual pop-promotion was in Vicky, and the removal of it was one of the most complained about changes from V2.

 

[Johan]

From what I understand you can for example conquer Carthage, empty its population and send Roman population to replace it.

Doing this is a bit cost ineffective.

1 - You can only move a pop to an adjacent province, or across a seazone. Which means that to reach the city of carthage from rome itself, you'd have to go through gibraltar, which is somewhere between 80 and 100 provinces to pass through. Less move it down to 50 if we jump along the coast where possible.

2 - The city of Cartage at the start of the game has 28 pops and the entire province of Carthage has 181 pops. There's 6 other provinces in what is modern Tunisia, but lets disregard that.

3 - Moving pops away from the province of Cartage would be on average 3 moves.

4 - Moving a single pop currently costs 20 civic power.

Lets assume the population growth of Carthage until you take it is offset by the amount of slaves you take from the city as you conquer and occupy it.

Moving all of carthages pops away from the Province of Carthage would cost about 10,860 civic power. 181 pops, 3 moves on average, and cost of 20.

Moving down 13 pops to have 1 pop in each city in the province of Carthage would cost about 15,000 civic power. 15 pops, 50 moves & 20 cost.

A large empire (which gets +3 power bonus due to government rank, if ideas match), with a good ruler would end up with maybe 8 power each month.

A cost of 25860 power, would take about 3230 months to accumulate, or about 270 years. ie, spending pretty much all civic power Rome would get through the entire campaign.

And thats just 1 province.

 

[Johan]

So the Strait of Sicily is not considered a sea connection?

The "strait" between Sicily and Carthage is a several seazones wide.

 

[Johan]

Johan's answer to "Do pops slowly assimilate into state religion and/or culture?" and "Can we convert culture by spending some mana?" were both "no"

There are ways for assimilation though. Which will be talked about later.

 

[Johan]

So according to the devs we won't be able to replicate Roman Colonization like it happened in Utica and the like... Really disappointing stuff.

Utica was a phoenician city that existed for over half a millenia before becoming the capital of the Roman Province of Africa. It was even on Rome's side in one of the Punic Wars.

There were Romans moving there during the timeframe, but the amount of people moving would amount to perhaps 1 pop, so its not a good example.

The rest were basically assimilated, which is another mechanic.