Victoria 3 - Dev Diary #129 - Discrimination Rework

[Diskianterezh]

Nothing like that is currently planned. So you don't handpick the cultures and decide their acceptance status, but rather make changes to the big picture.
I could see us adding things the player can use to affect acceptance of certain cultures or in certain regions in the future, but none are guaranteed as of right now.

Wouldn't the solution in such cases be to release a vassal?

Generally speaking, players often prefer to annex brutally in order to control wealth directly (more profitable, less loss of control over what the AI does), whereas in reality this ‘letting go’ was often forced, in order to maintain local peace. Will this more granular discrimination system allow for real secessions (and not simple revolts that are quickly crushed) and cornelian choices for players at this level? I'm thinking in particular of Austria-Hungary, but also of the many colonial states in Asia and India where control was often exercised by local governments.

 

[timmak1]

I need more information about citizenship laws and assimilation.

 

[Askorti]

I believe we left the rule in place. It also seems sensible to me. What would be your main arguments for changing it?

Realism. Just because a pop lived in their homeland didn't actually stop them from assimilating. Under the partitions, Poles still assimilated to some extent with the occupying empires. Living in Posen or Warsaw didn't stop that, and to be honest I dont see at all why it should. In part it was a result of organized germanization/russification campaigns, but the truth is simple. Some Poles were assimilating into German/Russian cultures over that span of those 123 years. (again, mostly for practical reasons, such as avoiding discrimination, to have better work prospects, education access etc.)

It seems to me like you might be looking at this strictly from colonial perspective, like, "why should Hindus assimilate with the British while still living in India?" But that's a very narrow view that doesnt take into consideration other scenarios in which assimilation occurs.

 

[Fenneru]

I believe we left the rule in place. It also seems sensible to me. What would be your main arguments for changing it?

An example would be that the Ainu were almost entirely assimilated into Japanese culture during the time period to the point that there are likely hundreds of thousands of Japanese people living today who have no idea they are ancestrally Ainu. That currently can't happen in-game because Hokkaido is an Ainu homeland so they don't assimilate.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

Okay, this screen is a mess.

1. It repeats "in the Cultural Erasure Acceptance status" over and over again, even tho that is the tab I am on, I understand, that this is what it means, please reduce the text wall by removing it.
2. Some lines are not clear. "Wage for Pops"... well, I hope it exists? It should specify the modifier, -30% for example.
3. All should use third person verbs. Why is Allows Assimilation, but Allow work.
4. There isn't much information here on the data. I assume the size of bars at the top is somewhat proportional to size of population in this bracket, but a pie chart of number of people in this bracket by their culture could be nice. Also maybe a percentage number of pops in this bracket / all pops.

 

[yurcick]

seems to me like you might be looking at this strictly from colonial perspective, like, "why should Hindus assimilate with the British while still living in India?" But that's a very narrow view that doesnt take into consideration other scenarios in which assimilation occurs.

Maybe some explicit "colonial" statuses are needed.

 

[faljen_isus]

Wouldn't the solution in such cases be to release a vassal?

Generally speaking, players often prefer to annex brutally in order to control wealth directly (more profitable, less loss of control over what the AI does), whereas in reality this ‘letting go’ was often forced, in order to maintain local peace. Will this more granular discrimination system allow for real secessions (and not simple revolts that are quickly crushed) and cornelian choices for players at this level? I'm thinking in particular of Austria-Hungary, but also of the many colonial states in Asia and India where control was often exercised by local governments.

Vassal release is good but starts eating bird mana if you release a bunch of vassals and does not do the same thing (you lose general control over an area)

This system would enable de facto cultural autonomy to selected pops, and reasons for this can be various, I personally have reasons of historical realism and historical fantasy for the most part, and for role play reasons: like one part of my empire has been ravaged and bled for decades in war and I want to elevate them above all other non primary culture pops, as a token of gratitude, however I do not want to lose permanent control over the area and it's military capability

 

[FranklyJustNess]

Looking at just this, and understanding how the current implementation works, and so having a clear idea of what this version probably works like... I can't tell what I am looking at. Like is it supposed to be, that I am thinking "Okay, so Afro-americans in USA... they share a cultural trait, so it's +25"? Probably... but I am gonna take a different, clearly wrong, but fully compatible with this list idea, are Corsicans accepted in Morocco?

• they have a culture (doesn't everyone?) so +10
• they have two cultural traits, so that's +50
• they have a heritage, so +50
• I guess they have both a heritage and cultural traits...? Okay +75 it is
• There is Corsican tag where it's a primary culture, so +100

Okay, so their cultural acceptance is 285... pretty average, I guess?

It doesn't specify, that these traits need to be shared with local primary cultures, it doesn't say they are mutually exclusive, etc. It's just a tooltip the players need to learn to understand what it was supposed to mean.

 

[FranklyJustNess]

A bit sad to not see interactivity with the system for now, like changing the individual discrimination rules for specific cultures for acceptance or at a cost of it, but maybe it will come in future updates.

There's currently that issue, when you play as a country with a sizeable minority, that there's nothing really to do about it. Peru, Australia, the companies, Guatamala, Boer republics... The cultural minority can actually be a big majority of the local population, but without passing multiculturalism it's just not something you can address in any way. At least it opens the possibility of keeping them willing to assimilate... Tho then they probably won't, because I assume the homeland rules around assimilation stay unchanged?

 

[TitaniumMan91]

It shouldn't be possible to have migration to the point where the primary culture is no longer a majority and not have any negative effects from that.

What kind of negative effects, though?

 

[mikhail321]

I believe we left the rule in place. It also seems sensible to me. What would be your main arguments for changing it?

It currently includes any military buildings. I'll add it to our list of things to consider for a future version though. Thanks

The argument for allowing assimilation in homelands (with penalties of course) is to make assimilation relevant for European and Asian empires that comprise many homelands. Now assimilation is mostly a tool to deal with immigration and internal migrants, but it is not that useful for a conquering country. With the change you can both simulate historic efforts to assimilate cultures even in their homelands and add more benefits for keeping restrictive citizenship laws (so you can promote said assimilation) instead of just jumping to multiculturalism

 

[Lamartine]

Currently it is fixed. We could maybe make it dynamic dependent on what law you are changing or maybe even how your society is composed (?) in the future.

Yeah, it could be few things

1. Gap between old law and new law. So moving from Ethno-state to National Supremacy has something like a 10 year cooldown, Ethno-state to Racial Segregation has a 15 year cooldown, Ethno-state to Multiculturalism has a 75 year cooldown, etc.
2. Gap between old acceptance and new acceptance. So moving from 25 Acceptance to 30 Acceptance has a 5 year cooldown, while 55 to 75 acceptance has a 20 year cooldown, and 60 to 85 has 25 years. Or something to that effect.
3. Other policies reduce the cooldown. There's a lot of research into reducing prejudice IRL and I there isn't one slam-dunk answer how to do it. However, for a game like Victoria 3, the Contact Hypothesis is a decent framework, whereby social prejudice can be reduced when there is equal status, common goals, cooperation (or inter-reliance), and support from authorities. In game, this could simply mean that some laws reduce the cooldown when the citizenship law is changed, e.g. Mass Conscription shortens the cooldown because many different POPs are conscripted to serve a common goal in the army; public schools shorten the cooldown because children of different backgrounds are more likely to share a classroom.

 

[wilcoxchar]

A) Is assimilation still forbidden in Homelands? E.g can Hungarians assimialte if their acceptence status is low enought? (I really hope so=

Assimilating in homelands wouldn't really make sense with historical behavior. Pretty much all historical cases of what in-game would be changing a majority culture in a culture's homeland were accomplished historically through migration of the country's culture's population into the area and migration of the homeland population out of the area, not through assimilating the existing people in the area. Even cases like parts of Wales becoming English in the 19th century were more through Welsh people leaving and English people moving in than the local Welsh population adopting English culture.

 

[Ronin Szaky]

The argument for allowing assimilation in homelands (with penalties of course) is to make assimilation relevant for European and Asian empires that comprise many homelands. Now assimilation is mostly a tool to deal with immigration and internal migrants, but it is not that useful for a conquering country. With the change you can both simulate historic efforts to assimilate cultures even in their homelands and add more benefits for keeping restrictive citizenship laws (so you can promote said assimilation) instead of just jumping to multiculturalism

It definitely should be possible, albeit with a huge penalty!

We already have many assimilation-related events that are rendered practically useless due to homelands being all or nothing.

 

[yurcick]

Even cases like parts of Wales becoming English in the 19th century were more through Welsh people leaving and English people moving in than the local Welsh population adopting English culture.

Is it, though?
Well, even if it is so, surely you won't argue that the Anglo-Irish case is the same?
We've been kinda ignoring the elephant in the room with a broader "Irish" label, but in fact the loss of the Irish Gaelic language speakers share is precisely "assimilation to a less discriminated culture" in game's new terms.

 

[wilcoxchar]

The argument for allowing assimilation in homelands (with penalties of course) is to make assimilation relevant for European and Asian empires that comprise many homelands. Now assimilation is mostly a tool to deal with immigration and internal migrants, but it is not that useful for a conquering country. With the change you can both simulate historic efforts to assimilate cultures even in their homelands and add more benefits for keeping restrictive citizenship laws (so you can promote said assimilation) instead of just jumping to multiculturalism

Assimilation shouldn't be useful for a conquering country though. The game only takes place over a century, you're not going to have much population actually changing culture, and you really didn't see that historically even in Europe. What people seem to want to try and replicate in the game is the cases where due to poor economic conditions a homeland's population would leave the region for better prospects and the primary culture would move in in their place. Not assimilation of an existing pop. And in that regard, actually shifting the culture of European homelands should be very difficult to accomplish, because again the game only takes place over one hundred years. It's not something that should be easy to do just by existing and owning the land.

 

[Ronin Szaky]

Assimilation shouldn't be useful for a conquering country though. The game only takes place over a century, you're not going to have much population actually changing culture, and you really didn't see that historically even in Europe. What people seem to want to try and replicate in the game is the cases where due to poor economic conditions a homeland's population would leave the region for better prospects and the primary culture would move in in their place. Not assimilation of an existing pop. And in that regard, actually shifting the culture of European homelands should be very difficult to accomplish, because again the game only takes place over one hundred years. It's not something that should be easy to do just by existing and owning the land.

You are very correct in saying that "flipping" majority cultures in a province should not be easy. However, assimilation should still generally be possible, even if it is often not feasible.

What I mean by that is that homeland cultures should assimilate if all the laws, decrees, and modifiers are in place but still at a meager pace. There are many real-life examples of this, and I must admit that probably all are deplorable yet are in line with our historical/economic simulation.

 

[Lunyicon]

View attachment 1194160
Looking at just this, and understanding how the current implementation works, and so having a clear idea of what this version probably works like... I can't tell what I am looking at. Like is it supposed to be, that I am thinking "Okay, so Afro-americans in USA... they share a cultural trait, so it's +25"? Probably... but I am gonna take a different, clearly wrong, but fully compatible with this list idea, are Corsicans accepted in Morocco?

• they have a culture (doesn't everyone?) so +10
• they have two cultural traits, so that's +50
• they have a heritage, so +50
• I guess they have both a heritage and cultural traits...? Okay +75 it is
• There is Corsican tag where it's a primary culture, so +100

Okay, so their cultural acceptance is 285... pretty average, I guess?

It doesn't specify, that these traits need to be shared with local primary cultures, it doesn't say they are mutually exclusive, etc. It's just a tooltip the players need to learn to understand what it was supposed to mean.

I thought it's pretty obvious?
I know you are just pretending to be stupid here, but knowing that acceptance ranges from 0 to 100 and that primary culture gets 100 acceptance, most people if not all would have guessed that these are mutually exclusive with only the highest one being active

 

[Desseabar]

I believe we left the rule in place. It also seems sensible to me. What would be your main arguments for changing it?

For assimilating pops in homelands:
It's relevant for Russification (e.g., forced assimilation of minority populations in Siberia and Central Asia, in addition to migrating ethnic Russians to that area).
The more "fun" option is Austrian alt-history, or grosdeutschland: in the early 19th century, there was a big debate in Austria of assimilating populations by teaching them German language and culture. So there's a world where you see educated Poles or Hungarians assimilating to German-ness and a cultural homogenization of the country. It could be something similar to how South American cultures develop.

Someone else mentioned assimilation as an institution/law, which I think is the right direction. Maybe a new law group on assimilation, something like:
- Cultural preservation: lower assimilation in exchange for happier minority pops (so, weaker secession movements early game, but late-game you get a stronger nationalist secession movement)
- Natural assimilation: default
- Forced assimilation: decreases acceptance but increases pop assimilation rate and range of pops that assimilate

 

[FranklyJustNess]

I thought it's pretty obvious?
I know you are just pretending to be stupid here, but knowing that acceptance ranges from 0 to 100 and that primary culture gets 100 acceptance, most people if not all would have guessed that these are mutually exclusive with only the highest one being active

Some of the ideas I toss in are really quite stupid, yeah. But some are pretty understandable, and I can imagine people assuming one of those few things. The problem is, that's it's a tooltip, that should provide a good base for understanding the whole cultural acceptance system, but instead you need to understand the whole system to have an idea of what it does.

While I would still say the final +100 one needs a slight change in wording, it's certainly the most straightforward one. But being mutually exclusive comes mostly from knowing 100 is max (I guess it could just specify it's a percentage number). However the wording of some of them is just terrible. "+10 Acceptance from culture" makes no sense whatsoever.

I am a player who understands the horrendous tooltip behind Brazilian naval power entry, and generally has no problem reading the codelike logic of some journal entries, like New Culture one for South American nations. But I know plenty of players struggle with those.

It could say stuff like

• 100% acceptance for Primary Cultures
• 75% acceptance for cultures with a shared heritage and cultural trait
• ...
• 10% acceptance for other cultures