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mikl said:
I don't think it's neccesarily a language difference. And I am not saying it's across north/south lines. But if you are dividing french culture (because it's too powerful?), then you leave german culture as the single most populous on the board, and therefore potentially very powerful.

The closer german culture gets to the north western coast, and holland, the more broadminded it gets.

I also feel that a swiss culture has little to do with the abcense of the Hapburgs, and more to do with geographic isolation. Prussia - the classic "germanic" culture today, has baltic culture in the game. Same german language, same cultural difference in game terms as Iberian and Cherokee.

Perhaps one could bring back swiss culture (say 2-3 provinces), add a northern german culture (another 2-3 provinces?) called hanseatic made up of Holstein, Mecklenberg, and Bremen.

This reduces the power of german culture a little, and might make it more difficult for Bavaria to hang onto a arger germanic empire. It may not solve the constant-war issue for the small german provinces though.

Or am I missing something in the thread here?
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I would disagree. The break up of France into subcultures has a far firmer basis as there are substantial differences between the regions during the time frame in question! Not only do they not speak the same essential language (almost as big a shift as from French to Italian), but they have substantially different customs, myths, and dress. There is a far greater degree of difference between Occitans and Savoyards and Parisians and Normans then there is between Tyrolians and Saxons. The Prussians are a bit of a special case as they technically are not truly a Germanic people but a Germanisized one.
 
MattyG said:
One very important point is that we don't work backwards from the present. NOW the Germans are more broadminded in the North, but were they in 1419? And does this make for a different culture? North-south differences in Italy make no difference, and the completely different language of Catalunyan makes no culture difference in Iberia. Clearly there are significant enough similarities that the peoples in those regions felt they could live with governance from others in those regions.

Which is why I still think that German culture can't be so easily divided as the Occitan can be from French.

However, if a good alternate history is provided, like the emergeance of a distinct culture in the Hansa provinces, as mikl suggests ....
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There is an excellent case to be made for splitting North Italian from South...

Have you ever seen a Neopolitan nod "yes"? They use the Greek method of doing so which is an upward motion of the head, with a downward motion along the same up/down plain being used for "no". Their entire body language is totally different and somewhat alien to the Lombards. They are more like Greeks that speak Italian in the early part of the game and remain substantially different throughout in customs etc.

There is still enough of a cultural difference that there is serious talk periodically in Italy of seperatism along a North/South split...

And there is still strong but waning regional identity in France including a very vocal seperatist movement in Corsica and Savoy. Whereas there has almost always been a very strong sense of German identity that transcends borders, just look at the Frankfurt congress of 1848.
 
yourworstnightm said:
What about splitting the dutch culture in flemish and frisian. Let Holland, Geldre, Friesen and Oldenburg have frisian culture, and rest of the lowlands have flemish culture, and make sure Bavaria doesn't have both cultures. The south dutch (flemish) culture could be given to both Hansa and Bavaria, and maybe through events to Burgundy, while the frisian culture should be very hard to achieve (but Hansa could get a chance to gain it).
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Friesen and Oldenburg I could see... but Geldre was German at the start of the game, and Holland not so much on the Frisian...
 
bobtdwarf said:
there really is no "Swiss" culture during the game timeframe. They were, and to a great degree still are "German". Same customs, same language, same style of traditional dress as the other South Germans/Tyrolians....
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God, what is culture? Surely it's a bit more than wearing clogs and speaking the same language. I wear the same clothes and speak mostly the same language as an American, but I doubt whether we have anything else in common. I have even less in common with Australians 40 kms away in rural Victoria. So I find it hard it hard to believe that there is can be 3 cultures in Aberrated France, but a single culture all the way from Bern to Hamburg, even in 1419.

Even in the 6th Century, there were (heading north) Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Alemanni, Lombards, Thuringians, and Saxons, all in the area we currently designate in EU2 as german. 900 years later in 1419 things are certainly different, sure. But a single culture? Doubt it, even among the southern germans.

This was the reasoning behind the creation of a hanseatic culture in AbeII.

bobtdwarf said:
They included Swiss culture to simply make them a PITA for anyone to hold onto them. But in Abe the Hapsburgs crushed the initial Swiss revolt and crushed it hard, so there will be no development of a "Swiss" culture.
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"Culture" in EU2 isn't real culture anyway. It is exactly as you mention, a trigger for revolt risk, and a multiplier for reduced taxation and production. It represents resistance to rule by an "outsider"

In vanilla EU2 swiss culture rises out of it's successful struggles for independence. In Abe, yes, the Habsburgs crush the swiss, but also in Abe within 50 years of starting the game the Habsburg are begining to disappear, starved for good marriages and deccimated by smallpox.

So if Bern/Schwyz successfully reassert their claims for independence and establish a sovereign state, then maybe that swiss culture is (re)created.

I will add something to the Swabian file in the next few days and you can all review my proposals then.
 
bobtdwarf said:
There is an excellent case to be made for splitting North Italian from South...

Have you ever seen a Neopolitan nod "yes"? They use the Greek method of doing so which is an upward motion of the head, with a downward motion along the same up/down plain being used for "no". Their entire body language is totally different and somewhat alien to the Lombards. They are more like Greeks that speak Italian in the early part of the game and remain substantially different throughout in customs etc.

There is still enough of a cultural difference that there is serious talk periodically in Italy of seperatism along a North/South split...

And there is still strong but waning regional identity in France including a very vocal seperatist movement in Corsica and Savoy. Whereas there has almost always been a very strong sense of German identity that transcends borders, just look at the Frankfurt congress of 1848.
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I've obviously changed my opinion on Catalunya since I made that post. Catalunya is now Occitan culture. :)

There is a case for a divide in Italy.

But here's the real problem: we are running out of culture tags. We have already gained one in Aberration by merging Armenian and Georgian area cultures, and if there was someone posting fromthat region they would be shocked and dismayed, most likely.

But I still can't buy this unified German culture notion, especially when, as mikl points out, culture in EU2 is more 'would they be willingly ruled by' or 'who would the nobility accept' rather than 'what language do they speak and how do they nod their heads'.

Unfortunately, there is no standard guage at work here. Frustrating, isn't it?
 
bobtdwarf said:
Well....

lets look at this from a RW perspective for a moment. There were a number of "countries" in the HRE as each noble had the right to negotiate with foreigners in regards to his own lands. However, that is only part of what is needed to be a functional "state", the other parts are: Military power and economic/monetary independence.

When you factor those other two vectors into the equation you are left with a far, far lower number of "countries" in the HRE. The only ones that could be considered in that catagory would be the Palatinates and Margravates. Since a Palatine has the ability to not only raise troops, but mint money as well as make war upon the enemies of the empire. A margrave can raise troops and make war but truly can not mint money so giving them a bit of slide here as they can do two of the three.

So IRL the minors, unless they also had lands in one of the Palatinates or the Margravates that entitled them to be called a Palatine or Margrave and access to the powers granted to those titles etc. should not be considered a viable and playable option as they would be under the jurisdiction of the HEI technically.

But the game does not handle that very well, and as a result we have those same minors getting gobbled up by the bigger "nations".

Which is about as good a way to handle it as I can see. Frankly, some of the minors should NOT be in the game as they are not capable of survival within the game because of how it handles the HRE. And since I can not see a way to make the game handle this situation any better, IMHO just let the minors get gobbled up.
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A powerful point.

Alternatively, we could mimic the RL situation by giving all the german minors an RM with each other, and 150 relations with each other... surely a mirror of RL conditions. And perhaps start them in 1-2 largish alliances, also mirroring their potential voting direction in the Empire at 1419.

Then if someone does DoW thorugh the AI, it's accumulated BB will keep it in conflict for years until it finally gets devoured.

This would make player-nations of Hansa, Burgundy, Swabia and Bavaria less likely to pick them off one-by one (our other problem).

Whaddayathink?
 
mikl said:
God, what is culture? Surely it's a bit more than wearing clogs and speaking the same language. I wear the same clothes and speak mostly the same language as an American, but I doubt whether we have anything else in common. I have even less in common with Australians 40 kms away in rural Victoria. So I find it hard it hard to believe that there is can be 3 cultures in Aberrated France, but a single culture all the way from Bern to Hamburg, even in 1419.

Even in the 6th Century, there were (heading north) Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Alemanni, Lombards, Thuringians, and Saxons, all in the area we currently designate in EU2 as german. 900 years later in 1419 things are certainly different, sure. But a single culture? Doubt it, even among the southern germans.

This was the reasoning behind the creation of a hanseatic culture in AbeII.




"Culture" in EU2 isn't real culture anyway. It is exactly as you mention, a trigger for revolt risk, and a multiplier for reduced taxation and production. It represents resistance to rule by an "outsider"

In vanilla EU2 swiss culture rises out of it's successful struggles for independence. In Abe, yes, the Habsburgs crush the swiss, but also in Abe within 50 years of starting the game the Habsburg are begining to disappear, starved for good marriages and deccimated by smallpox.

So if Bern/Schwyz successfully reassert their claims for independence and establish a sovereign state, then maybe that swiss culture is (re)created.

I will add something to the Swabian file in the next few days and you can all review my proposals then.
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If we go by the revolt risk version of culture... and that is not my preference as a sole method of defining what a culture IS, then there still is only one "German" culture as the nobles had possessions all around the HRE. Off the top of my head the Hohenzollerns were a South German family with possessions in the North that eventually took precedence and eclipsed their original possessions in the South. As a result most people think of them as a Northern/Prussian family. The Wittelsbachs had possessions in Walloonia via their Lowenstein branch, still had minor possessions in the Netherlands as well as estates in Hungary.

My overall point is that the people being ruled did not find them to be foreign no matter where the estate was, they may have thought that they talked funny... but the aristocracy always talks funny in comparison to the common man..

A reimergence of "Swiss" culture would make some sense later in the game as a way of showing Swabian seperation from the empire.
 
MattyG said:
But here's the real problem: we are running out of culture tags. We have already gained one in Aberration by merging Armenian and Georgian area cultures, and if there was someone posting fromthat region they would be shocked and dismayed, most likely.
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We could run out of culture tags, but don't panic yet. This is why I made a thread listing all the cultures and which ones we have/haven't used:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=201488

When I wrote it there were 23 spare cultures, even taking account of new cultures we'd agreed on such as hanseatic. There's also a list of 15 possible cultures there, but those included every plausible proposal I'd heard up to that point.

What's changed since then? As far as I can tell, the only changes are that arabic/moorish has been refined further into andalusi, arabic and berber (and maybe one more, I can't remember), and Calipah has proposed suquli. That leaves 21 or 22 cultures left, versus a proposal list of 16.

In any case, we haven't yet reached the point where we have to start sacrificing cultures, and we could implement everything that's been suggested so far if we wanted. Of course, we soon will run into trouble if we award cultures frivolously, but it would be wrong to suggest that every new culture will come at the expense of an old one: we're still mining the dozens of useless native-only cultures that Paradox included in the vanilla game.


On the specific issue of German culture, which has proved rather controversial in the past, the 'cultural' arguments for splitting it up are all very debatable. One could even argue about how artificial the german/dutch split is in Abe. The real worry about German culture is balance, because anyone who has it automatically has a huge culture-zone, especially if we want to give them other cultures as well. In particular, there are problems with the TO or an Italian-oriented Swabia having the culture, even though both are clearly German in origin.

One thing we can continue to do is nibble at the edges of Germanness, wherever there's a reason to do so:

1. The TO has Baltic as its primary culture for balance reasons, but is really led by Germans for most of the game. What we could do is say that in Abe, the local Germans have diverged somewhat from their western cousins, while some of the local Balts have been Germanised (as happened to the Prussians in real life), producing a 'Baltic German' culture. Ungermanised balts could then be labelled as 'baltic' or 'lithuanian' (as the former pagan state of Lithuania would represent most of them). Likewise, Germans further west who are assimilated into the TO can become 'Baltic Germans', with the limit of the TO's assimilation potential lying somewhere around Berlin.

2. The whole or most of Bohemia can be given Bohemian culture. 'Czech' is just an Anglicised version of Slavic words for 'Bohemian', and Bohemia would have been called something resembling 'Czech' by the locals in 1419, so we might as well pick one or the other.

3. Swabia could have a 'Swabian' culture. Because of the cardinal rule on removing primary cultures, it would then start with 'swabian, german', and if we decided it couldn't have german + italian, we'd switch it to 'swabian, italian' later.
 
Incompetant,

As of Beta 5 I have had three files in the DB folder, one listing all the current tags, one for IDs and one for cultures. That's where players can go to see what's waht in the most up-to-date listing. Very useful for people writing material. :)

We don't have that many cultures remaining, and we still have Asia to re-mod. But I'm not panisking, either. ;)
 
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