EU5 doesn’t have that balance issue though, unless things that give you cultural capacity end up being really OP
I have no idea how powerful it will be, all I know is that it has been confirmed that WC is possible by developers on the Steam forum (I don't support this to be clear) and this means in practice that they will have to allow you to be able to not have to deal with overwhelming rebels, I assume, through cultural tolerance mechanics.
Speaking of, this is still a genocide button. You are in a matter of decades changing a large population’s culture via centrally directed state action. Any real world examples of this working are considered a genocide, I guarantee it. Forced marriages with men of the preferred culture is pretty much the only way this could be done, since public schooling isn’t a thing yet, and every other measure either involves killing people or is better represented by the culture being non-accepted.
100% agree. I think that the "culture conversion" mechanic is a childish abstraction that allows the player to get what they want without feeling horrible about themselves and what they are doing.
The most, and perhaps only, universally successful "culture conversion" method is already fully integrated into the game through the pop system. You can in the game deport people from certain lands, or raise specific locations with the cultures you want to "convert" as levies and run them into enemy stacks or let them starve to death, while encouraging resettlement from people of your own culture. This is what culture conversion is, but this is such a naturally sickening idea to every sane person that they need to abstract these atrocities to a button where you get a cabinet minister to do equally horrifying things in a slightly different way.
I do think that EUV is a game, mostly, played by adults who have a separation between themselves and the simulation they are a part of, so I don't think the game needs to chastise them for acting immorally, but I do think the game could be a bit more intellectually honest about what pressing that button entails.
A simple way to do this would be to just remove the button, and integrate conversion into laws, for example, public beatings for speaking the national language, land seizures, discriminatory tax rates, forcing people to take on names from your culture, fabricating famines or mass poverty and then creating soup kitchens or work camps that require conversion to benefit from, and publishing pamphlets depicting the converting culture as naturally inferior and incapable of running a state. (All of these things are real examples that happened to my own people, and by far not the worst examples)
At the very least, I think that they could include some events that could give players an indication of what is happening. But yes, the truth is that conversion from a central authority, especially in the time that game puts forward, necessitates violence and genocide.
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