Wrong concepts of cultures in Paradox Games

[exenter]

They are seperate from every nearby culture

So is Albanian culture and no language is similar to the Albanian language.

Anyway. If you don't like how the cultures are grouped together then just mod it.

 

[anomanderus]

Yes, yes we get it. Paradox ignores places not from western or northern europe in the game except "cool" countries like china and japan and byzantium and russia. Come back and ask for your correct berbers and slavs after paradox makes ethiopia a monarchy with islamic tech group, adds in sikh religion with religious decisions such as: establish the khalsa, found amritsar and compile the adi granth. And don't forget, Swahili=kilwa sultanate and kilwa sultanate= shiite, not sunni. The same with Deccan being the Bahmani sultanate, which was shiite, not sunni. Doing this would make shiite survivability go up for when persia doesn't form or forms as a sunni empire (despite persia only having two sunni provinces). Finally don't come back until Jewish "expell the jews" and "take in x-country's expelled jews" events are added in.

 

[BritNavFan]

Queen of Britain, Empress of India, ruler of places all over the world... I think it makes perfect sense. What other term would you use that could embody world domination and the period in question? (Please say I haven't missed the sarcasm and looked foolish)

No sarcasm at all. I actually have the game and have played it: didn't register it because I didn't find it fun. But the newbie guide I found suggested playing Brazil for a first game. What does Brazil have to do with Victoria? The game's about the age of industrialization, not the age of exploration, and almost all the significant colonization's over. There are plenty of other countries as or more interesting than Britain in the period, most obviously the USA, which actually has a significant war to give variety to the economic game. The game also covers WWI: again, what does that have to do with Victoria? And while I don't doubt the game gives the natives more detailed names than "natives", I expect that's pure fluff: for all practical game purposes one native tribe was equally trivial for a European country to conquer as another in this period.

Similarly, in "Crusader Kings" most playable dynasties aren't kings and are going to spend much more time administering their home duchies/counties/earldoms than crusading, and "Rome" includes a lot of playable countries that aren't Roman. The games' titles are designed to indicate the time period. They're not intended to be taken as literally as the title of a figure in a refereed academic journal.

In the EU3 period, on the other hand, native countries actually do things that are interesting in terms of gameplay: the successful ones conquer and expand, they advance technologically, many need diplomacy and most are involved in trade, and sometimes one will fall or fragment. Unlike in Victoria, it would actually add to gameplay to develop them further: they're potentially interesting to play in their own right and some are powerful enough that making them more realistic would make the game more interesting for players of European countries that encounter them.

I don't know where someone got the idea that adding cultures causes a performance hit. Adding country tags causes a performance hit, as countries regularly need to be checked against each other and against every country event in the game, among other things. Cultures and culture groups will just be a few kb of indexed array in RAM that are read from disk when the game is loaded and looked up when the game needs to know about them for some reason. The devs have said that they're trying to remove cultures that don't have country tags associated with them because that causes strange results when rebellions arise, but they've also said that they don't care about cultures that occur strictly in provinces that are colonizable (and therefore cannot have rebellions unless colonized).

As a result of this, adding new cultures in areas that already have one culture for every country, such as Mesoamerica, would be a potential performance issue and a lot of work, because you'd need to add a new country tag, and history, and shield, to make the new culture meaningful. But it's not a big deal at all to add a new culture when you already have several existing countries all associated with one culture, as happens with the "Mali" culture in Africa, or to spread existing cultures over different culture groups.

 

[lordkestrel]

Can you please explain me this?
Why are Hungarians, Romanians and Albanians considered South Slavs while Basque are not considered Iberians but they have their own culture group?

As has been mentioned countless times before, culture decisions are for gameplay reasons. Basque for instance isn't in the Iberian OR French groups, because countries with that culture as their primary culture are allowed to form either Spain or France.

 

[wobbit]

@BritNavFan

Sorry, the point I was making was that "Victoria" has conotations of the British Empire and hence of a game spanning the globe. Yes, Britain wasn't the only major power of the time or even the most powerful, but it was the most widespread empire. "Europa Universalis" on the other hand implies Europe above all else. Likewise, "Rome" is asociated with an entire historical period as well as the major empire around which is set. "Crusader Kings" is harder to justify for the reasons you've said, but it does indicate that the game is primarily about christian realms. Of course, this is all just personal opinion.

I'm not disputing that having more detailed cultures would be desirable, I'm just saying I think I understand why it wasn't done.

 

[Meothar]

I think it is okay the way Paradox handles this topic. Culture groups are not based on DNA but where and with which neighbors the people lived. Both berbers and tuareg live in northwest Africa and are muslim. This is enough for a common culture group. I don't know any berbers or tuareg but I think that when a berber and a tuareg met in 17th century, there were less problems than when a berber or tuareg met e.g. a persian.

 

[Generalmotors]

Can you please explain me this?
Why are Hungarians, Romanians and Albanians considered South Slavs while Basque are not considered Iberians but they have their own culture group?

"Ignorance is bliss". I think that because Romania is not a world power, is a minor culture, therefore there is no reason to pay much attention to them. France and Germany rules, that applies to video games too Didn't mean to be rude, is just my opinion.

This is enough for a common culture group.

Q.e.d.