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Europa Universalis IV >  Workshop > penguintopia's Workshop > Veritas et Fortitudo > Discussions
Veritas et Fortitudo
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omega13 17 Sep, 2018 @ 5:28pm
States system
I'm continuing from a comment I made earlier and couldn't fit my thoughts in a comment.

My main points of contenstion is that regions and culture groups are the arbitray part so any system based on them will be arbitray.
Take a resurgent byzantium (or some other State that stradles a two regions, byzantium is just the easist example of one I could think of). Its heartland would be Greece and the coastal regions of Anatolia but with the current mechanics Anatolia is completly out.

With the culture part I think ignores any sort of accepting culture. There should be some mechanic to simulate the acceptance of both groups the occupier and the occupyed. ex. The English ruled England saying that Welsh/Cornish are alright and the Welsh/Cornish accepting that they're under the State of England. or going back to the byzantine example, it would not be unreasonable to see an Orthodox turks accepting rule from constanople. The main thing driving this is that religion played a bigger role than culture for most of the period. It's not really until after the French Revolution and the idea Nation-States that culture becomes a huge driver. More often it was Religion and distance from political center that controlled things.

My suggestion would to have states based on distance/adjacency to the capital, with autonomy or state maintaince increases(scaled to tech and governance or whatever) for being next to territories, other States, and being far from the capital. At some point it would be unprofitable to make an area a state so they would stay territories. This would aproximate a heartland that is under more central control with very limited control on the perifiery. As for non-primary cultures, maybe make a larger penalty to provinces with non-primary cultures. This way Hungary could accept Croatia as part of its 'crown land' as it did historically.

TL;DR: regions and culture groups are arbitrary divisions, proximity to the capital would be better.
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RivtalDM  [developer] 18 Sep, 2018 @ 9:38am 
At some point, anything is going to be arbitrary. Even the cultures and culture groups end up with arbitrary determinations in many cases and this is a question about culture not the concept of naiton-states; one does not need the idea of nationalism for it to be clear that a Gascon French speaker has more in common with a northern French speaker than with an English or German speaker.

The point of a state in VeF is to represent the heartland of a nation; the people who actually matter when we talk about the nobility and the peasantry the monarch interacts with. That certainly means that every single province a naton holds should not necessarily be a state.

There is a difference between an accepted culture (such as a resurgant Byzantium which has a large Turkish population) and one which is truly equivalent to the primary culture. During the Spanish Empire's long holding of Naples and Sicily, those would definitely be classed as accepted cultures but yet the power of the monarch in both those regions and his interaction/relationship with the subjects in each of them was still quite different from that in Spain. Several hundred years with a Spanish king does not make you Spanish.

The problem with letting accepted cultures be the methodology by which states are made is that one can simply drop and add those cultures at will in such a way as to make everything a state.

Proximity to the capital is bound to be itself arbitrary and wrought with complications; how far does it extend, what other factors get taken into account (if northern Sweden is too far from Stockholm are they somehow not offically Swedish despite being Swedish) (if I draw a circle from London that catches the south-west coast of Norway, am I seriously saying they can exert the same control over Agder [relatively short sea voyage] that they can over a province in Bavaria [abrupt sea voyage followed by a LONG land trek])
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omega13 18 Sep, 2018 @ 4:10pm 
In my mind state/territories is supposed to simulate at least the amount of effort the center tries to control an area. Northern sweden is certainly swedish but it is also certainly harder for stolkholm to exert control over it. The difference between how much control London can exert on Kent and Northumbria is.
The point I'm trying to make is that hard breaks are not great ( this is why I'm not really a fan of state/territories in general) where things are much smoother. A State's 'heartland' is blury thing. The only thing that can be said for sure is that eminates from some center of power. It would be some weight formula where distance (land and sea provinces should be counted differently) and other factors (religious tolerance, cultural acceptence, tech, ruler ability, stability, devlopment, etc) get smashed to together somehow and ther result is something that would reflect the amount of control the center exerts. This would result in an emergent 'heartland' that gradually changes into the periphery. The state/territory mechanic could then be used as a way to approximate a delibrate granting/revoking of local self-rule.
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