Dev Diary #47 - Conversion and Assimilation

[lachek]

How do discrimination laws work if you manage to gain more than one primary culture?

Is the trait-check based on the original primary culture only, or will the other primary culture's traits be counted as well?

All primary culture's traits are counted in the case of multiple primary cultures.

Also, I hope Promote National Values will make sure that pops convert to the official religion rather than any accepted religion: it makes little sense for the Protestant, Freedom of Conscience UK givernment to actively advocate conversion to Catholicism, for example.

It doesn't in the current build, but we plan to make that the correct behavior under that Decree, yeah.

 

[lachek]

So there is no way to have a forceful Germanisation/Russification of for example the Polish or Baltc Lands, since the pops there are in their homelands, and will never ever assimilate?
I can understand, that this would happen much slower, but eventually it should happen.

So for example you said currently without modifiers after 30 years 1/2 of the pop would convert to your religion and you can speed it up. So why not have it like 120 years without modifiers for assimilation in homelands, and 60 years with modifiers that in the short term anger the people (school only in your language, streetsigns in your language and so on) to assimilate 1/2 of the people. Maybe even slower than that.

But I dislike an outright block.

We're looking into this, but we didn't want this to be the behavior of natural, passive assimilation - there are numerous examples of minorities who have retained their cultural identity in nations hostile to them for hundreds of years. Rather, as you say, this should be the result of forceful, active assimilation on part of the state. But we also do not want forceful, active assimilation to be the primary means of engaging with the assimilation mechanic, since this counteracts some of the core design principles I outlined in the DD. But stay tuned on this topic.

Also a question about Shinto in Japan, what religious group are they, if Japan goes for Freedom of Conscience. Is there any other religion in their group, or are they grouped with Buddhism? Or will State-Shinto not be a thing, and Japan will always stay Buddhist as their state religion?

Shintoism are not grouped in with any other religion, so in countries with Shinto (or Hinduism, or Judaism, or Animism (which, as an aside based on some other comments here, I concur is much too broad - hoping to represent the diversity among animist religions better sometime post-release)) as a state religion there is no difference between State Religion and Freedom of Conscience laws.

 

[lachek]

Can minorities assimilate into other minority cultures? For example will Africans brought to Cuba through the Slave Trade assimilate into Afro-Caribeno?

Not currently, but this is actually on our list of things to at least try out - might not be prior to release, though.

 

[lachek]

can the assimilation and conversion base rate be modded outside of defines and decrees,with temporary event country or state modifiers for example?

The base rate is a define that you can change, and on top of that you can add other modifiers on country- or state-level, or on any database type that applies modifiers on that level. So you can make Laws affect it, Decrees, Technology, even Ruler or Interest Group traits, among others. Even buildings can apply modifiers to their states, so you could mod in a Clockwork Orange-style re-education center building if you wanted. And of course you can apply all those modifiers via events as well.

Out of curiosity, is it possible to mod:
1) A country to have multiple national religions (in general, and specifically without breaking this system)
2) A third trait (say, language - or maybe magic in a fantasy conversion mod) which also follows some sort of assimilation rules?

Countries cannot have more than 1 national religion, though that's only because we haven't seen a need for it in vanilla. We may add support for more if only for mods. As for traits, cultures and religions can have as many as they like, though only one major/heritage trait each.

 

[lachek]

So Italians(and Irish, and Greeks, etc.) and any other "white" Europeans won't be discriminated against in America? Please reconsider the approach here, to imply that Italians faced no discrimination during this era is ridiculous. There was a significant portion of northern Europeans(and northern Italians, for that matter) who considered (esp. southern, though not exclusively) Italians to not be "white" like the rest of them, and tbh white basically meant Northern European at the time to many people in America. Additionally, as has been mentioned above Catholics and Protestants were definitely not singing kumbaya and dancing into the sunset in this era either.

At the very least heritages need to be somewhat more granular with north european and south european being separate for example.

At the moment our system is designed to primarily represent legislated discrimination, not systemic interpersonal discrimination Pops may experience by being minorities. We're going to look into this more in the future because we would like to represent for example the American dynamics you're referring to, but we also didn't want a system whereby you could pass a law to make everyone in your country suddenly get along. Instead, assume we are not currently modeling interpersonal discrimination other than indirectly via Turmoil.

 

[lachek]

Can you take actions to remove a cultural homeland over time? For example, if you were Japan, and conquered Korea, could you somehow still assimilate Koreans culturally, as was attempted historically?

A cultural homeland is defined as a region that Pops of a certain culture consider to be their homeland, so another country cannot remove that designation for as long as there exists Pops of that culture (and if they don't, the homeland has no effect, naturally). Mechanics for adding or removing homelands was something we discarded quite early on in development due to the timespan of the game - a long-term action could not take longer than 10-20 years to carry out in order to have any effect on your campaign, and that's not enough time to effect cultural shifts that major.