Alternative climate models

[Zerodv]

What I'm saying is that it should only be used as a starting point. Sticking to the classification and trying to change the model to get an outcome you want is unnecessary when you can just directly change the climate to whatever you want it to be.

The process of deciding which threshold and which metrics to use is also changing the outcome I want.
While I might be trying to achieve a different climate for Russia and Manchuria relative to Northern China/Korea and Central Europe I won't do it if I have to use forced metrics to do so, which is why I think it's worth discussing what matters more for humans between length of snow cover, shortness of growing seasons, coldest month etc. which are all quite correlated but not equal.

There is no value in data being objective when you're designing a game. This isn't a database for scientific research, its purpose is to be balanced for gameplay. If you want some regions to have a more or less favorable climate in order to portray their historical population/development, just change their climate. You don't need to try and manipulate the underlying classifications to get the result you want, when you can just directly change it in the game.
The academic value of creating models that can better represent historical population patterns is obvious, but when it comes to developing a game, it's just a waste of time.

I think the issue is this approach can easily feed circular logic
"Why was X place not settled"
"Well because it has poor climate for Y people to settle it"
"What's the proof for that?"
"Y people didn't settle it so it must have had poor climate"

Take for example the Manchuria case, initially I was skeptical whether it made sense to split continental there, but after looking at the data I indeed realized the rapid temperature gradient shift in winter which definitely must have an impact which has been overlooked using the initial model. On top of this there was also the issue of Russia being in the same bucket as Central Europe which basically equates places that might have merely 1month of snow cover to 4.

Now I could manually decide which locality is which based on my intended goal of representing the differences in population between the 2 pair of regions, but this might be simply feeding in bad ideas on why the demographics of the region were like they were, because Manchurians and Eastern Europeans had access to different crops, technology, had different histories etc.

Trying to directly justify their relative success in terms of population density and amount of food produced by arguing the climate is the primary factor is to me a step too far.

You talked about adding soil fertility to vegetation, but wouldn't you do it based on real data or use it to artificially boost places that seem to be poorly represented by climate alone?

 

[Linbot#6018]

The game doesn't accurately portray historical reality because of the model it adheres to. I have nothing against trying to come up with a better model, but that's an academic exercise. It's much easier to fix things in the game by just... fixing them in the game.

It might be easier, but I think it's much more productive to ask deeper questions about what we're getting wrong. If you rely on band-aid solutions, eventually you'll find that the game turns into a pile of rigid, arbitrary fixes.

Asking the deeper questions lets us find more relevant phenomena that deserve to be accounted for in the game, and in fact I would argue it is the most productive way of doing that. You cannot really hope to make the game more realistic if you don't understand why it's unrealistic.

There are many problems that can stem from this. For example, the EU4 devs clearly figured out that shortly after the start date, the ruler of Moldova was replaced by a different ruler who invaded the country with Polish support and won a civil war, and then the country became a Polish vassal. The devs failed to see the true solution to this, which is to make such struggles a star feature of gameplay in Romania (because this kind of thing happened all the time for centuries and the country constantly passed between the influence of its neighbours), and instead took the short-sighted option of just adding an event to the game that enables that specific power struggle in the 1440s to occur. This makes Moldova actually feel more fake and unrealistic than would otherwise, because the devs clearly had the information at their fingertips that showed them what the true solution was, and ignored it in favour of a band-aid fix.

 

[zeruosi]

Another example is the North China Plain, there is a region is western Hebei that is marked by many classification systems as steppe, but in real life it seems not to have been naturally vegetated as steppe, nor is it less populated than nearby regions. We could either conclude that it was sustained by irrigation, or something about our semi-arid classification is wrong, or we are using data that's inaccurate for the history we are concerned with. A "just paint that area specifically as continental" approach is tempting, but inelegant.

I don't think the western part of Hebei Province mainly relies on irrigation. The reason is that the rainy season there arrives only a few days later than that in Shandong Province, and it also ends only a few days later. Moreover, unlike the Guanzhong region of Shaanxi or the Jinzhong region of Shanxi, it doesn't lack clouds and isn't extremely hot. Hebei is often cloudy and naturally has a large number of forests growing there. What's even more strange is that Beijing, which is located further north than Hebei, does not belong to the grassland climate or the relatively arid climate.