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Dev Diary #47 - Conversion and Assimilation

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Happy Thursday! Today our topic returns to Pop mechanics, with a discussion around some of the finer details on how Pops may change their religion and culture over time depending on your nation’s legal system. The mechanics themselves are quite straightforward, but as always in Victoria 3, the applications of them can have quite different outcomes in different situations.

Let’s begin by reviewing the mechanics around Discrimination, since this will be important later in the discussion. We’ve already talked about most of this in other dev diaries but some details here may be new.
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Discriminated Pops have barely any Political Strength and cannot vote. This means the only way they can impact your country’s politics is by agitating for change through Political Movements, or by starting a civil war for self-rule through a Cultural Secession. In addition to being hamstrung politically, they also get paid substantially less than their non-discriminated counterparts, have a harder time developing Qualifications for certain Professions, and their presence in your country is a potential source of radicalism and Turmoil.

Whether a Pop is discriminated against or accepted depends on who they are, the national identity of the country they live in, and the laws of that country. Both culture and religion are potential reasons for discrimination, and these are controlled by different laws. Your Citizenship laws determine which Pops are discriminated against on the basis of their culture, while your Church and State laws determine which forms of worship are considered acceptable in your country. To be considered non-discriminated by these laws, Pops must pass a more or less stringent selection criteria based on how much they differ from the primary culture(s) and state religion in the country.

For example, under the Racial Segregation Citizenship law, only Pops whose culture’s heritage trait matches that of their primary cultures heritage trait will be accepted. The heritage trait indicates which region of the world the culture originates from (e.g. European, African, Indigenous American), and under this law that is the only thing that matters - whether the Pops speak the same language, or are both transplants in the New World, is unimportant in determining their status. By contrast, under Cultural Exclusion, any similarity between a Pop’s culture and one of the primary ones qualifies them as equal under the law.

The total set of options are:

Ethnostate: only Pops of primary cultures are accepted
National Supremacy: Pops whose cultures share both heritage and another trait are accepted
Racial Segregation: Pops of the same heritage are accepted
Cultural Exclusion: Pops whose cultures share any similarities are accepted
Multiculturalism: no cultures are discriminated against

State Religion: only Pops who adhere to the state religion are accepted
Freedom of Conscience: Pops who adhere to a religion in the same family as the state religion are accepted (e.g. any branch of Christianity, any form of Buddhist)
Total Separation: no religions are discriminated against

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The practical impact of these laws therefore depends on what the state religion and primary cultures of your country are, as well as who actually lives in your country. An Ethnostate operates no differently in practice than a Multicultural state if only Pops of primary cultures live there. Since Pops are unlikely to mass migrate to your country if they’d be oppressed there once they arrived, until you expand your borders and populace by force you may not see a practical difference (except for a curious lack of immigrants). But if you were to form a Customs Union with a poorer neighbor, resulting in a lot of economic migration within the market to your country, you might have to deal with substantial political strife until you take steps to loosen up your Citizenship laws. If the option exists for you, as an alternative you might consider attempting to unify your nations instead (which we’ll learn more about next week) in order to accept both cultures as “primary”.

Alright, now that we’ve cleared up how countries can adapt to the Pops, we will consider how Pops might adapt to their country.

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First let’s tackle Religious Conversion. Pops who are discriminated against on the basis of their religion will always be in the process of converting to an accepted religion. The religion they convert to is not necessarily the state religion, though - it could be any accepted religion that is dominant in the state where they live. An Indigenous American following an Animist religion in a United States with Freedom of Conscience instead of Total Separation is eventually going to convert to some form of Christianity to avoid religious persecution, but if they live in a Nebraska that has been settled by predominantly Catholic rather than Protestant Pops, they would convert to Catholicism even though Protestantism is the dominant religion in the nation as a whole.

Pops convert at a percentage-based rate, currently set to a base of 0.2% / month (as usual, numbers such as these are subject to balancing and change before release, and are always moddable). A percentage-based conversion rate naturally means a diminishing number of actual converts over time, so at this rate it would take almost 30 years for ½ of your discriminated population to convert. If you find this rate too ponderous for your strategic goals, you have two primary tools at your disposal to speed it up.

The Religious School System law + institution combination increases this rate by +20% per investment level, up to a potential maximum of +100% (i.e. twice the speed). It also increases the Education Access of Pops overall and increases the Clout of the Devout Interest Group.

The other method is the Promote National Values decree. Like all decrees, it is issued in a certain state and costs Authority for each state it is issued in, so in a larger country you will have to focus your efforts. Promote National Values doubles the rate of both conversion and assimilation.

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Using a combination of both methods, you could speed up religious conversion such that ½ of a minority population can be converted to an accepted religion within the span of a 10 years. Of course, your school system only extends to incorporated states, so if you’re trying to mass convert Pops in conquered land or colonies you will have to do so by decree - or embark on the often lengthy and painstaking process of incorporating a part of the world that’s culturally alien to your country.

This leads us to cultural assimilation. The conditions for assimilation are a little more complex than conversion, and in some ways operate by the reverse logic. In order to start assimilating, a Pop must already be culturally accepted. After all, if they can’t get citizenship, can’t vote, can’t participate in politics, can’t get paid a fair wage on the basis of who they are, there simply is no way for them to assimilate - by which we mean, integrate themselves into a primary culture such that they are both accepted as such by others and genuinely consider themselves part of that culture. Renouncing one’s religious beliefs and practices can be a very practical and concrete choice, but adopting and being adopted by a different culture is not a utilitarian decision.

In addition, Pops will never change culture if they live in a state they consider their Homeland. A Franco-Canadian in Ontario might over time adopt the ways and tongue of their Anglo-Canadian neighbors, but a Franco-Canadian who resides in Quebec?! Plutôt mourir!

(And of course, if a confederated Canada has been created with both Anglo- and Franco-Canadian as primary cultures, none of those types of Pops would be changing cultures in the first place.)

If a Pop should be assimilating, the culture they will be assimilating into will always be a primary culture. This is because, again, this is not a practical decision that’s just up to the Pop in question, but a two-way-street of assimilation into the dominant national identity. In the case of countries with multiple primary cultures, the one selected will be the Homeland of the state the Pop lives in, or in case none or several apply, the dominant one among Pops who already live there. A Czech Pop living in a unified Germany (North + South German) in the state of Silesia (North German and Polish Homelands) will assimilate into the North German culture; if they lived in Bavaria they would be assimilating into the South German culture; and if they lived in Bohemia they would not assimilate at all, since Bohemia is a not only a South German but also a Czech Homeland. If this Pop instead lived in Transylvania (with both Hungarian and Romanian primary cultures and Homelands), they would be assimilating into whichever of those cultures is more dominant in the part of Transylvania where they live.

The rate of assimilation is the same as for religion, 0.2% per month. As mentioned, the Promote National Values decree can be used to double this rate on a per-state basis. In addition, a Public School System will provide an increased assimilation rate of +12.5% per investment level, representing perhaps a less overt approach to indoctrination than their religious counterparts. With maximum effort, this means you can assimilate half of a minority population in about 18 years.

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I’ll end on a small design note. While our primary motivation while developing these mechanics was to provide a logical and believable simulation, a nice side effect of the asymmetry between conversion and assimilation is that there’s no way to benefit from both without an asymmetry in your laws as well. An inclusive, accepting, discrimination-free society won’t also become religiously homogeneous over time, nor will an oppressive, xenophobic country be able to assimilate their cultural minorities just by waiting them out while throwing resources at integrating them. Culture-wise, Pops need to be either accepted or harshly dealt with, now or in the future. Being accepting of all faiths today means there will be problems if you backtrack in the future. There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for dealing with heterogeneous populations.

There are of course a few good examples of countries that already start out with asymmetrical Citizenship and Church and State laws. The Ottoman Empire, home to a lot of cultural and religious minorities, has fairly lenient Citizenship Laws but zero separation of Church and State. As a result they will initially have a lot of both assimilation and conversion, and increasing the rate of those further might be one way for them to try to minimize Turmoil due to discrimination long-term. Meanwhile, the United States has total separation of Church and State (zero religious conversion, but no religious discrimination either) but Racial Segregation laws that cause considerable population segments to be discriminated against, particularly Indigenous- and African-American. Since none of these populations will ever be assimilating unless the Citizenship policy changes, this problem will not just go away on its own. Either the United States changes course legally, or they will have to continue dealing with trouble caused by the oppression of these minorities for the following century.

That’s all for this week! Like I hinted above, next week Martin will get into how Unifications work in Victoria 3, which I for one am very excited about!
 
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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.

Any cultures extinct at game start that can be reborn? ;)
 
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Exploitation. Discriminated pops have lower wages and no political power. You can exploit them for cheap labor to provide both more profits for your factory owners and cheaper goods for your pops, generally it should not be possible to get both. Unless you know, you sacrifice something or someone else.

You can probably use slaves to achieve even greater return on investment but in that case, you will be losing taxes as well because slaved don't have wages, discriminated pops still pay taxes.
Yes. But I think that's more in the realm of shifting wealth inside your country, rather than increasing it. The overall productivity or SoL will not rise because you exploit a pop i think, but I may be wrong. If these things are your goal, your best bet will be multiculturalism. Formerly discriminated pops have more power now, yes, but they are also happier and will assimilate over time. They are also less likely to secede. Plus you're now an attractive migration target. More people have access to education thus improving the quality of your workforce.
 
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Yeah, but you could also use a dozen other words for it. Most people nowadays think of Richard Spencer etc. when you use the word 'ethnostate'. Why not 'ethnic nationalism', 'nativism', etc ...

But counting the 'Respectfully disagree' reactions on my original post, I guess it's just me ...
I agree that at the very least it's a weirdly contemporary term. It's weird to have a whole pillar of government using the term "ethnicity" in an era when everything was about nations.

Nativism is perfect. Short, simple, and very appropriate to the time.
 
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As I understand it, there are at the moment no drawbacks from multiculturalism and it's the single best option, if not for roleplaying purposes. Now it even comes with assimilation benefits! I understand it's hard to balance that without making some sort of political statement, but from a gameplay perspective I find this a bit odd. You will always want to progress towards that law, of course there are some adversaries in your way, but they are mere obstacles, not people with an opinion worth considering. It's like in HoI4 were you always want to progress towards war economy. Just feels a bit oversimplified and monotone.
National Supremacy gives twice as much authority as Racial Segregation. Numbers are of course not final and need balancing, but that alone is to me enough incentive to keep your cultural and religious acceptance laws as narrow as possible.
 
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i'm not sure to understand , but if you annex, say , rhineland as France using the left bank CB , those germans would not assimilate? same if you conquer maghreb, local pops would stay the same?
Yes. Like how it realistically happened historically, turning another culture's homelands to your culture would have to be accomplished by population transfer and settler colonialism rather than direct assimilation. Even a lot of the supposed cases that can look like assimilation from a surface level, like the often brought up here case of the Anglicization of Wales during the time period, were actually more a result of assimilating populations moving in and native populations emigrating than direct conversion. During the 19th century hundreds of thousands of Welsh emigrated from Wales while English migrants poured in to work in the mines and other jobs brought by the industrial revolution to the point where something like a quarter of Wales was English-born or first generation English descended by 1900.
 
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As I understand it, there are at the moment no drawbacks from multiculturalism and it's the single best option, if not for roleplaying purposes. Now it even comes with assimilation benefits! I understand it's hard to balance that without making some sort of political statement, but from a gameplay perspective I find this a bit odd. You will always want to progress towards that law, of course there are some adversaries in your way, but they are mere obstacles, not people with an opinion worth considering. It's like in HoI4 were you always want to progress towards war economy. Just feels a bit oversimplified and monotone.
The drawback is accepted pops in IG's will get furious if you implement something farther towards multiculturalism before it's a popular idea, which is reflected not only in which IG's are influential but the traits of the IG's leading character. This means you cant just immediately pass these laws because no one will like it and you'll get high discontent, get stonewalled on passing the law, or potentially a revolution. ALSO a government that is even capable of passing it so early on, probably just Intelligentsia, will have low legitemacy and more problems in general.

The other drawback is that if you have laws that permit more cultures and religions, you'll get more immigrants from those countries, who need jobs, so if you dont have enough buildings to employ them theyll have a high unemployment rate which causes pops to radicalize and lowers general SoL.

PLEASE I'm hoping that unaccepted pops also have a harder time finding employment, i.e. are deprioritized for buildings hiring, and/or (preferably AND) unaccepted lower strata pops are willing to work for lower wages, creating militancy among accepted pops who have more political clout. This does not seem difficult to implement and would be great simulation representation of the immigration and nativism dynamics of the period.
 
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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.
I feel Shintoism really should be in the Buddhist group.
 
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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.

My question was based on the discrimination of religions not in the same religion group as your state religion, when you go from "State Religion" to "Freedom of Conscience". So if you as Japan switch to State Shintoism, if Buddhist pops are discrimnated against or not.

I am not 100% sure, but I think Buddhism was not discrimnated against in the later Japanese Empire, just that State Shintoism was much more promoted.
So even if you switch to Shinto as Japan, you probably should get an event after a while to have New Buddhism as a "secondary religion", where people are not discriminated as, but maybe with special Japanese event modifiers or so, still slowly convert to Shintoism as their main religion.
 
I feel Shintoism really should be in the Buddhist group.
I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure Shinto is near universally practiced alongside some form of Buddhism to one degree to another, rather then being mutually exclusive with it. The lack of mutual exclusivity in many East Asian religion is something of an awkward subject for game mechanics in general, but since it's almost always practiced with some form Buddhism specifically, making Shinto a form of Buddhism seems like an easy way to square this particular circle
 
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Yes. But I think that's more in the realm of shifting wealth inside your country, rather than increasing it. The overall productivity or SoL will not rise because you exploit a pop i think, but I may be wrong. If these things are your goal, your best bet will be multiculturalism. Formerly discriminated pops have more power now, yes, but they are also happier and will assimilate over time. They are also less likely to secede. Plus you're now an attractive migration target. More people have access to education thus improving the quality of your workforce.
I mean while productivity went through the roof during the industrial revolution it is a post scarcity economy. Not everyone can have everything, and you get to pick who will have and who will not.

Also isn't manipulating wealth inside your nation like the whole point of the game? Also you can export the cheap goods somewhere where you get a lot more for it.
 
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I feel Shintoism really should be in the Buddhist group.


I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure Shinto is near universally practiced alongside some form of Buddhism to one degree to another, rather then being mutually exclusive with it. The lack of mutual exclusivity in many East Asian religion is something of an awkward subject for game mechanics in general, but since it's almost always practiced with some form Buddhism specifically, making Shinto a form of Buddhism seems like an easy way to square this particular circle


Maybe Shinto is state religion with Buddhism as accepted religion?

(Shintoism as included in Buddhist group or as separate Animist group?)
 
"Pops who are discriminated against on the basis of their religion will always be in the process of converting to an accepted religion."

I understand that some things have to be abstracted for the sake of gameplay, but really? The 2 largest religions in the world, Christianity and Islam started as "discriminated" religions. But they certainly didn't die out.

Some percentage of pops will always be willing to convert because they aren't devout enough, however there will also be those who would rather die than bend a knee to something they don't believe in. I would suggest a logarithmic curve of conversion, where at first the converts come quickly, but then it becomes slower and slower as the ratio changes. This would emulate the "SUPER DEVOUT" while still having the number of pops part of the original religion dwindle. EDIT: The system does this already ya dummy!
 
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"Pops who are discriminated against on the basis of their religion will always be in the process of converting to an accepted religion."

I understand that some things have to be abstracted for the sake of gameplay, but really? The 2 largest religions in the world, Christianity and Islam started as "discriminated" religions. But they certainly didn't die out.

Some percentage of pops will always be willing to convert because they aren't devout enough, however there will also be those who would rather die than bend a knee to something they don't believe in. I would suggest a logarithmic curve of conversion, where at first the converts come quickly, but then it becomes slower and slower as the ratio changes. This would emulate the "SUPER DEVOUT" while still having the number of pops part of the original religion dwindle.
Well, it kind of already works like that. Each month 0.2% of the remaining minority population converts, so as the minority numbers shrink, so does the amount of monthly converts.
Pops convert at a percentage-based rate, currently set to a base of 0.2% / month (as usual, numbers such as these are subject to balancing and change before release, and are always moddable). A percentage-based conversion rate naturally means a diminishing number of actual converts over time, so at this rate it would take almost 30 years for ½ of your discriminated population to convert.​
30 years to convert half of the original discriminated population, another 30 to convert half of the remaining half (a quarter of the original population), and so on. You won't be able to wipe out a religion completely from a state, barring some heavy migration.
 
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I think it's less traightforward than this.

Assimilation usually happens when it is economically advantageous to do so, at least as far as linguistic assimilation is concerned. Why do people stop teaching their children their ancestral/minority language and instead teach them the national majority language? Because it gives the children greater economic opportunity and higher chances of social upward mobility. This is why minority languages die out nowadays, it's simply not opportune to maintain them in many circumstances.

I think this also applies to cultures generally. If your culture/language gives you the same economic opportunities and advantages as the majority/primary culture of your residence, then there's no incentive for you to forsake your culture/language.

Why do Sorbians in Brandenburg and Saxony assimilate during the 19th century? Because it would be hard for their kids to get better opportunities than their parents speaking only Sorbian. On the other hand, if you have a sufficiently large minority population, like Poles in Prussia, Posen/Poznan and Silesia, then you have less pressure to assimilate as there is still much economic opportunity without doing so. Especially with an established Polish middle and upper class present in many places.

Thinking about the whole system some more, I now feel the focus is too much on institutional factors and too little on economic and social factors.
Don't forget bullying and propaganda. Children are cruel, and the attitudes they get from their parents are probably a strong factor in other children assimilating. Between that and class lessons of a nationalist bent (particularly History), I'd say Public Schooling should even have a similar effect on Assimilation as Religious Schooling does on Conversion.
 
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I don't remember, does accepted culture/religion effect probability of employment in a building? If it does that should be a part of this discussion, if not it should absolutely be implemented. It would be a very natural way for unaccepted pops to have a lower standard of living.
As far as I can tell, unaccepted pops are actually more likely to be hired because you can pay them less. (Presumably leading your accepted, unemployed pops to complain about them coming over and taking their jobs.)

However, that mainly applies for low-level jobs like laborers. For higher-strata jobs, there are multiple barriers that will prevent unaccepted pops from getting qualifications: explicit maluses for jobs like Aristocrats, lower access to education, lower wealth, etc.

The overall productivity or SoL will not rise because you exploit a pop i think, but I may be wrong.
So? The whole point of an oppressed underclass to do your hard labor for you is that you don't care about their standard of living. You only care about the SoL of pops that are politically engaged, and that you can increase by shifting their burdens onto the oppressed.
 
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I'm not an expert, but I'm pretty sure Shinto is near universally practiced alongside some form of Buddhism to one degree to another, rather then being mutually exclusive with it. The lack of mutual exclusivity in many East Asian religion is something of an awkward subject for game mechanics in general, but since it's almost always practiced with some form Buddhism specifically, making Shinto a form of Buddhism seems like an easy way to square this particular circle
You are correct, and State Shinto was only implemented within the games timeframe, meaning Shinto could be in the Buddhist group and the formal seperation of it from Buddhism in japanese politics would already be perfectly represented by existing game mechanics, maybe just a journal entry for flavor.
 
The visual representation of pops seems to include two characters of the same heritage; any chance we would see mixed heritage couples?
I feel that this would be unlikely
 
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To deal with the Shinto situation, and to accurately represent the religious situation of some countries in the late game, there could be some sort of generalized "religious pluralism" option between total separation and freedom of conscience, where all religions not banned by some edict or event would be allowed to exist, but the official state religion would still be recognized and promoted slightly.
 
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