Europa Universalis IV

Europa Universalis IV

Common Universalis 5.0
On cultural assimilation
I love the mod. Thanks for making it.

It's great that cultural assimilation is a modifier that ticks up in every non-primary culture province. It's immersive and makes the system easy to grasp.

I'd like to discuss the convert culture decisions:

1) "start cultural assimilation": I like the idea of "be so nice to the people in the province that they want to embrace your culture." But:

1a) the name "start cultural assimilation" is confusing, because every province automatically has (slow) cultural assimilation.

1b) if I build something without immediately spamming buildings there to start cultural conversion, I feel a bit bad that now the integrity will tick down over time and there'll be one build slot less, which means that I've made it harder in the future to start cultural conversion. It also feels bad that I can literally run out of ways to spend money/monarch points to make a province happy and therefore fail my attempt to use "start cultural assimilation" (as it's going to tick down over time). Why can't I just give every citizen a pile of money or hold daily feasts until a province wants to culture-convert? If France conquered my country and gave me $10k per month for free, I'd happily learn French.

1c) My suggestion: remove this "start cultural assimilation" decision altogether. Instead building anything should give an immediate +x progress to cultural conversion, in the sense that Romans building aquaducts in Gaul territory helped convince the Gauls to become part of the Roman empire. Alternatively, have "start cultural assimilation" cost 50 dip & 10 prestige if you're at 90% integrity (as is already the case), but if you're say at 50% integrity then you have to pay a ton of ducats on top of that to get it started, to bribe the locals. I'm fine with it being so expensive that it may not be worth it in practice, to explain why it didn't happen a lot in history.

2) Force immigrants feels really good to use. Spending the precious manpower and having your primary culture provinces de-populate is properly costly and feels organic and realistic. It's also fun that once you have converted a province to your culture, you can depopulate that province to convert further provinces. It feels like you're spreading out, it's fun. Great mechanic.

The only thing I don't love about force immigrants is the abrupt "can't do it at development 15+" cut-off. I feel a bit stressed to do force immigration on all provinces before they reach development 15+. I'd prefer it if development 15+ just meant that it took a lot longer to do or cost more manpower or something (it's fine if the increase is more than linear, it's fine if it becomes so expensive that it's not worth it in practice. Yes I get that few huge cities culture-converted in history -- making it incredibly expensive is one great way to explain that. I think "yes you can but it's very expensive and may not be worth it" is more fun than "no you can't").

3) Force language education: I like the flavor and the requirement of a university or public school. I was a bit surprised though that you only get the modifier for 20 year, which is often not nearly enough to convert the province. This a) makes this very costly and b) it's a bit tedious to have to remember every 20 years to re-click it and it feels bad if you forget to reclick it after 20 years (though I guess the Cabinet can help here). I don't mind the costly part that much, but it'd be great if this force language education was just a modifier that stayed on the province until it was converted, maybe with yearly costs if that's what's needed for balance.

Thanks for making the mod, I love it!
Last edited by adriaan_schipper; 3 Mar, 2021 @ 11:24pm