eu4 faster culture conversion


Genuine question: does having low tolerance of heretics actually hurt Catholic gameplay, or does it merely incentivize different play strategies? And as far as these things go it was rather quick, though a bit slower than EU4 depicts, the layering of swedishness over the native scanian culture was admittedly helped by a bunch of factors (similar cultures, the corresponding danish identity always having been rather weak and tenous and an upper-class thing, etc.)

What if the reforms of the Brothers Gracchus had succeeded? Not all English people were (or are) English in the same way, nor were all Catholics identically Catholic. This website is not affiliated with Europa Universalis IV, or Paradox Interactive. Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIc: Morale and Cohesion, Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIb: Officers, Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa: Discipline. Examples of these sorts of failed top-down cultural initiatives are practically endless; it is very hard for states to intentionally effect mass cultural change by main force as an intentional policy. This is a game about states, not nation-states; unlike in, say, Civilization you are not playing as a people, but as a political entity.

Now I think that the folks behind EU4 are actually aware of Imagined Communities, because they have embraced part of his thesis: the Enlightenment institution (more on those later), which appears around 1700 and requires the Printing Press institution substantially reduces culture conversion costs and it isnt hard to see how that fits with Andersons Enlightenment+Literacy+Printing_Press argument. Yes, what we might call cultural assimilation (though that term often doesnt grasp the complex ways that cultural identities layer on each other so that a person might be, for instance, Roman and Egyptian and Alexandrian and Greek-speaking and Christian, to take an ancient example) does happen and it often happens in and around state borders. So you do not play as a ruler, nor a family of rulers, nor as a government, nor as a people, you play as a state. short of killing/driving out the locals and replacing them with the right people, but since you usually change religion and culture separately, its pretty obvious this isnt whats happening.

I particularly wanted to discuss Paradoxs games, as compared to other historically rooted games, because I think Paradoxs oeuvre is a particularly rich vein to mine. In almost every game, everyone is about on the same level technologically by the end of the game due to how fast institutions spread. Moreover and this will be a frequent refrain for this series the player is given no sense of what impacts these decisions have on regular people.

They seek to crush all forms of resistance to the state, including passive ones.

Being Catholics means you get a permanent -1 to Tolerance of Heretics, the only religion in the game that has a penalty as part of its basic effects? Its really hard to know. Do you want to scream incoherently into the endless void that is the internet? The starting maps are based on historical borders at given points in time (and generally fairly accurate; far more so than is normal in the genre).

Wouldn't the max reduction be a permanent -90% though if one was playing as Karaman running Religious, Influence-Religious Policy and with the Englightment embracement? Dont know how it is in CK3, but in CK2 the game typically rubs your face in religious atrocities when given the opportunity. With a little experience, native peoples in colonized lands are either harshly put down (theres an option to proactively wipe out the inhabitants by forcing an uprising which permanently lowers the population if the battle is won) or to pursue a policy ofnot sure if appeasement is the right word, but one which prevents unrest at the cost of slower colony growth, though it will still finish eventually.

EU2 had a stability mechanic. The Quakers in Pennsylvania lived in relative peace with the local natives, as did the Jesuits in South America.

You can deport an unaccepted culture of religious province to the new world. I thought this was going to be a series with a wildly different tone, because I read that early paragaph as Paradox games are interesting because they are built with what I think is a detestable theory of history, >And what I want to note here is that the only real state agency in any of that is that some states encouraged mass literacy in the vernacular through public education, using state resources to teach new generations a standardized version of the national language (which is why countries like France have government agencies which determine correct spelling and punctuation, rather than how countries in the Anglophone world leave that issue to endless, ineffectual bickering between writing style guides, LAcadmie Franaise, the RAE, and presumably their equivalents elsewhere have very little effect on how their respective languages are actually used, for what its worth, Oh, Interesting!!! But the game doesnt say this and the little sounds the game plays when you do this (jingling coins, sawing boards and hammers pounding anvils) implies that we are to understand what you are doing is more akin to constructing infrastructure.

Sending a peace offer in favor of yourself is presented as a fair and just offer, if you send a diplomatic insult you get a mock I guess they took our words as an insult, how strange, and if your fort gets sieged (and you turned on the notification for that) it will mention something along the lines of our fort is under siege, but they shall break on it like waves on the cliffs. Like I said, they made promises they couldnt keep.

Oh, and for Culture Change my (swedish) bias is to consider the swedification of the Skne province, which, while it involved deportations, forced billeting of soldiers, and various other nasty tricks of the state, largely involved a kind of replacement of the ruling and intermediate classes (replacing danish priests with swedish ones, having most of the danish magnates relocate to Denmark or be replaced, etc.) Ex: If you have 50% Autonomy in a province, it will change culture 50% slower. Scotland has rebelled more times than I know, including in 1821, the last year of the time frame for Europa Universalis. But most of the ideas in question are much more broadly cultural, including things like Nationalistic Enthusiasm, Humanist Tolerance, Print Culture, and Shrewd Commerce Practice. And the very fact that these things are ideas rather than institutions you are not adopting a specific structure of government, but rather the idea of that structure of government is percolating through your society (there is a separate mechanic for enacting policies, which are enabled by having several compatible ideas) speaks to the degree to which what the player is actually doing is shaping the culture of their state. It definitely does that, but I think part of it is just that the game has no real ability to evaluate what is actually a reasonable peace offer. I dont want to say that these games are fascist, but the tension does exist. I actually think Imperator especially with its overhaul does have a theory of history, but it is a lot more interested in social history (thus the care to model pops). If you let players do a thing, some players will do that thing very happily and with an intent to express abuse.

It forcibly and suddenly increases the legibility of the province, and as a consequence, the people there hate your governance for a generation or so. Of course! Edo/Tokugawa Japan had popular press with color printing.

Upshot was i started a day tweaking son for getting sucked into playing a military shooter game with friends when school was just hardly running during the initial lock down at the end of the last school year. It is dangerous to oversimplify here and end up reducing complex states and societies into stereotypes caricatures of themselves, but the idea of a game simulating states that, being excellent at one thing are less excellent than their contemporaries at other things makes sense. Of course this still has flaws in the ways you stated; its a binary system, is far too quick and easy, causes no unrest, and does not model the human effects, particularly on the low classes who suddenly are speaking an inferior tongue to their rulers. Take, for instance, non-state polities (that is, people politically organized into things like tribes which are not states; for those who want a refresh on the distinction between states and non-state polities, check out this post, which covers states and state formation). While obviously not a morally sound act, it makes more sense that it costs diplomatic points than military, and is completed within the timescale the game represents. In other words, if you-the-state decide you want to appease the populace and keep unrest as low as possible, Im not sure dont centralize power and expand the administrative state would even help manage unrest in this era. Like the Tsar being the ruler of all Slavs. In the hands of a capable (line of) emperors, it can be progressively strengthened and unified into a single state, but that is too challenging for the AI and only happens with a player running the empire. This will reduce the development of the province you deported them from (and changes the culture of the target province in the new world) and (used to) change the culture and religion to your state culture and religion. Its a unique diplomatic network, thats members are allowed to wage war against each other, but the emperor state is allowed to enforce peace among them if its strong enough, but also to defend them from external threats. Also if you wealthy fighting your wars with mercenaries does avoid somewhat the war weariness constant drafts imparts. (The recent expansion Emperor significantly reworked that, also adding an alternate path of reform options for decentralization, that gives you bonuses while still treating the member states as a herd of cats), Also, there ARE personal unions too, Bret somewhat downplayed the role of what dinasty your monarch belongs to. When new, non-Quaker Scotch-Irish showed up, they tore up the peace (see the Paxton Boys), or Portuguese slavers in Brazil raiding and kidnapping Jesuit missions, or jealous Spanish settlers who wanted Jesuit charges impressed into encomienda servitude. This also, IMHO, is why Imperator and EU: Rome kinda never came together, it ended up being a Bit of EU4 and a bit of CK but not really leaning into either. You know about how many people and animals are in your clan (Rarely much more than a thousand humans, explaining how you have such information), how many goods are in your clans treasury, and a rough idea of how much food you have-with no idea (Unless youre very good at the game and have learned the patterns) how these numbers will change in exact values. A major part of strategy in the game is coming up with an overall strategic which harmonizes a states national idea group with the later idea groups taken). It was an important but slow process whereby those regional identities converged somewhat creating the big French national super-identity. The same process happened in most of Europes large states in this period or following it. Were going to get to these in Part III. Indeed, modern states can often only estimate these sorts of things in very broad strokes! Which brings us to the first big historical assumption that Europa Universalis IV essentially smuggles into the game as an unstated consequence of the game mechanics: in EU4 history is the story of states.

global trade is discovered in 1600, which is the same whether the world is mostly-historical or whether by then youve conquered the world by then and shut down all trade between different regions by assigning merchants to sit in every region blocking the flow of trade from leaving.) You see lots of stories about e.g. One example Scott uses early in his book is illustrative to how these processes went.

China of course had printing but I dont believe a popular press evolved from it there. You must log in or register to reply here.

https://www.politicalcompass.org/. Pops do a good job of making the galaxy feel less lifeless and making you pay some attention to the ethics and opinions of your citizens, but I definitely wouldnt say that Stellaris deals with the hidden costs of state power in any meaningful way. Often, you see a central area of state-owned mixed beech forest in lighter green in the middle of a forest tract and on the outskirts, small-scaled privately owned, unsustainable dense spruce plantations in darker green. This gives republics less of a penalty for holding unaccepted culture provinces. Events that change national policy in ways you like often reduce stability. (Also, I notice that CK2 isnt listed in that generation. I have already heard from multiple college-level instructors that they have students coming into their classes specifically to learn the history behind these games, which in turn means that these games are serving to shape those students understanding of history before they even enter the classroom. Im the lead of the Paradox Game Converters projects (the ones that ease running a megacampaign). This comes out clearest in the way that the game treats non-state organizations: it either re-conceptualizes them as states, or reduces them to largely predictable, mechanistic systems to be managed by states. If you arent in a good position to gain papal influence, the religion offers nothing.

The key piece of evidence of this being the case is that it is always easier to restore the original culture of any given converted province than change it to any other, no matter the development it has acquired. Humans are hard to keep track of; they move, marry, have children and die. Your empire is basically a giant production line for alloys and tech, with things like consumer goods and amenities only mattering to the extent that you need some of that to support the pops working in the alloy foundries. Weve essentially now discussed how that vision of history tends to hide the agency of things which are not states (institutions, peoples, polities, movements, etc), but it also tends to wildly overstate the power of states. Enemy burning a few cities to the ground eh, I have more, lets end this war and live in peace; but if the enemy would kill the player characters child, lover, or (god forbid) dog players will hunt the people responsible till the ends of the earth. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings. Also the mean time to happen mechanics guiding these interactions meant youll never know when exactly this would happen maybe tomorrow, maybe never. One of the diplomatic actions between monarchies is a royal marriage, sometimes if a royal marriage partner state of your dies without an heir their next one will come from your dynasty, and if a dynastic royal marriage heir dies, your state might inherit their throne (essentially similar to a vassal, with an option to entirely merge them into your state several decades later). Im not sure how deep the implementations really were, but the designers definitely had some things to say about their theory of history. Second, the player can spend resources (diplomatic power representing the cultural cache of the state) to add the culture in question to the accepted cultures list for the state, presumably representing a decision to reach an official accommodation with the culture in question. Well, the result is a game that implies a very lopsided perspective on the atrocities of the era. Its an unequal relationship where part of the union is determined to be the junior partner. Because the game is focused on states the only impacts we see are impacts on states. Now to be clear, EU4 is not a history course and I dont think the frame theyve adopted is necessarily bad. I feel like it can sort of go both ways, but only goes well under certain circumstances. Which is still better than the peoples the game does not convert into ersatz states. Now they are in a fantasy setting, but it has a fairly grounded set of stuff for that, at least as far as your clans politics are concerned. On arguing over culture conversion being too fast how much of that is simply a concession to gameplay? The last time Scotland was involved in a rebellion was the 54 Jacobite uprising (and this was more a dynastic conflict than a nationalistic one). A big part of the problem is that mechanics like Happiness and Factions are entirely toothless. I think there is definitely a bit of both, that is, I think Paradox (for EU4) explicitly leans into a particular kind of theory of history (while being aware of it) in order to create a certain game. While its a better teacher of history than something like Civilization or Age of Empires OGH is pointing out ways that EU4 fails at providing a good representation of how state actors impacted the world. Possibly due to the difference in writing systems? MeiouAndTaxes Wikia is a FANDOM Games Community. This is true even if the culture was wiped off of the map by conversions. Quebec and Scotland come to mind as places that have stubbornly hang on to their minority culture and have had some success at integrating into a parliamentary structure. . While its not quite the most extensive (both CK and Vicky is better at this) the EU games were actually notable for how LIMITED you were in a lot of ways compared to earlier strategy games (eg.

While the game does not tell you youre a monster, I think the detached accountant presentation does manage to put you ill at ease in its own way. These non-state peoples, rather than being converted into states, are treated as little more than soft gray clay, ready to be molded by the states around them.