Interregnum: Cultures and use of 'Native'

[MattyG]

While I have already been getting into writing up the new file for Brittany, I thought I ought to get a thread going for it.


One of the problems I am encountering is that chestnut or culture.

Currently we have brythonic culture for Cornwall, Armor, Morbihan and Bretagne. In reality, although the regions of Armor and Morbihan were under the rule of the Dukes of Brittany for a long time, they are not, except in their western extremities, brythonic speaking. They are part of the huge group of languages called the langues d'oil from which modern French was derived.

Now, remember that there was no French language in this period. It evolved much later, almost as a kind of 'esperanto' that got out of hand and actually flourished. There were just a lot of regional dialects which shared a common ancestry.

Except that breton did not, because it's a Celtic language.

So, if we define the provinces by their language, Armor and Morbihan ought more to be French than Brythonic. But if we go with the idea that there is more to an EU2 culture than language and accept that the peoples in this region were OK with Breton rule, then we could swicth the 'culture' to Breton, something that doesn't reference a language, per se.

However, Wales is not Breton, and while Cornwall is brythonic, I guess you could stretch it an say that in the 60 years it has been part of Interregnum's Brittany, it has also become 'Breton' for this purpose.

But that means having to give Wales its own culture name.

Gasp.

Unless - hear me out - we do something that may appear on the surface to be a little bit heretical.

Let's give Wales the culture 'native'. (Native is the in-game-appearing name for any province that has 'aborigin' as the culture-tag in the province.csv. In the same way, tuareg appears as scottish in the game.) Native is not the same as pagan, which is the religion, and its the religion pagan that causes difficulties by changing a province's culture when it converts from pagan to something else. Here are the advantages:

1. No one else in Europe (of significance) has Native as a right-culture.

2. It confers no detrimental stats on the province.

3. It means that Wales cannot conquer Brittany and have the right-culture for all the provinces (although we could script an event that would give it Breton culture.)

4. Wales gets no explorers and cannot find the new world as an ai country and get all the right cultures there. Even if it could, these places would have anyway changed to 'brythonic' upon conversion to catholicism.

All we need to do is make sure people don't get upset by the connotations of the word. It does not mean 'savage'. It means the people that always lived there, the natural inhabitants.

This use of Native would also make sense for some of the other single-province anomalies, such as Sardinia.

So, give Native to Wales and Sardinia, and make the four other provinces of Brittany "Breton-Gallo"

Thoughts?

 

[yourworstnightm]

Acctually have nothing against giving Armor and Morbihan french culture (only Bretagne ,Wales, Cornwall have breton), then if Brittany do not choose the french path Armor and Morbiahan's cultures are changed to breton. Wales could very well have breton culture, since welsh and bretonic (and also cornish) are much related to eachother. Also Brittany have at some point an option to get Wales, so breton culture would help. Opposing using native culture in Europe, are supposed to be a colonial matter.

 

[MattyG]

Acctually have nothing against giving Armor and Morbihan french culture (only Bretagne ,Wales, Cornwall have breton), then if Brittany do not choose the french path Armor and Morbiahan's cultures are changed to breton. Wales could very well have breton culture, since welsh and bretonic (and also cornish) are much related to eachother. Also Brittany have at some point an option to get Wales, so breton culture would help. Opposing using native culture in Europe, are supposed to be a colonial matter.

In what sense do you mean that native culture (meaning an areas indigenous inhabitants) is a colonial matter?

If your concern is that it sounds like a 'new world' culture then how about this variation: we use one of the remaining culture slots for a culture with a name that captures less of the feel of that, like:

Local
Localized
Provincial
Regional
Distinct
Distinctive
Distinct regional
Distinct local

MattyG

 

[yourworstnightm]

I just don't think Wales need an own culture when they could have breton/ brythonic. Armor and Morbihan could start with french culture, but converts tto gaelic if Brittany decide to neglect the Gaul.

 

[unmerged(34993)]

Very good idea Matty.

 

[MattyG]

I just don't think Wales need an own culture when they could have breton/ brythonic. Armor and Morbihan could start with french culture, but converts tto gaelic if Brittany decide to neglect the Gaul.

Yes, that works fine too, except if we wanted to have a 'Breton' (not brythonic) culture that covered Cornwall to Morbihan and represented culture as something other than language.

However, if we want to be more consistent about what Culture is in EU2, then we ought not to base it on language. There was no French language at this time, so French can only represent the willingness of the people in those provinces to be goverened under one king and their similar legal and customary systems. If we are using that concept of culture, then Breton should be used for Morbihan, Armor, Cornwall and Bretagne and Wales would need to have a separate culture.

Either way one could have that province convert to other culture names by event, of course.

 

[ForzaA]

In what sense do you mean that native culture (meaning an areas indigenous inhabitants) is a colonial matter?

If your concern is that it sounds like a 'new world' culture then how about this variation: we use one of the remaining culture slots for a culture with a name that captures less of the feel of that, like:

Local
Localized
Provincial
Regional
Distinct
Distinctive
Distinct regional
Distinct local

MattyG

that sounds better
except that, if you indeed go the route of giving Sardinia (and perhaps other places too) "local" culture too, you might eventually end up with a fairly big culture with perhaps 1-2 countries that have that culture and may abuse it. (the same goes if it's "native" ofcourse, but anyway)

 

[MattyG]

You are right in that we would need to be very careful with its use. Maybe three or four provinces in any continent.

Wales, Sardinia, Armenia, Ragusa too maybe. All of them quite far from each other too.

I like that Sardinia as a nation would have 'local' as its culture. I guess that if a player was serious about abusing it they could conquer all of Europe and have, as a result, four provinces with the accidentally-right culture. At that level it would NOT be worth it. But if the number of 'local' provinces got out of hand (say 8+ ?) then it might become a viable strategy.

I think the number of provinces that would be justified as requiring it are quite limited, but it will help bring the variety we need without using up too many slots.

 

[unmerged(34993)]

Maybe we will have no Sardinia possible. And no country will have "local" culture. Then there would be no problem.

 

[unmerged(31994)]

I have a proposal, the turkish kurdish cultures are somewhat....too much.Im making a major remake of the Caliphate based on historical sources and since this is afterall - an alternative history, though the turkish element is thriving, I would like to assume the Turks hadnt totally developed an identity - that is to say, they are sandwitched between Byzantium (greek/orthodox) and the Abbasid Caliphate (arabic/islam).With no unifying force (persumably the Seljuks didnt do well) and with many influencing cultures, I would assume they had developed a sort of "in between" culture which could be called "Rumi".

It means "Roman" of course, but they are after all, Arabized Greeks if anything else.Ethnically they are Turks, but speak Arab ,Greek and Turkish.They also mix all three cultures together.

Rumi shows the strength of culture in forming new ones.

 

[unmerged(20077)]

If this rather weird solution is to be adopted, perhaps the name of the culture might be "unique" rather than "native" to avoid confusion. Any culture could be said to be "native" to its own region and the word is certain to mislead some people because of its other use in the game.

 

[MattyG]

If this rather weird solution is to be adopted, perhaps the name of the culture might be "unique" rather than "native" to avoid confusion. Any culture could be said to be "native" to its own region and the word is certain to mislead some people because of its other use in the game.

Unique.

That's a solid idea. We just want to convery the concept of it being a local, single province unique culture, only in preferably one word or two short ones, because there is a limit as to how many characters will appear.

All of the colonizable provinces are 'unique' as well, so I can just replace the word 'native' with 'unique'.

 

[unmerged(31994)]

I have a lingering question as to why the two cultures 'sicilian' and 'romanian' have not been adapted yet?There already in the culture list, but I dont see them ingame.

The Romanian culture has one province, and is adopted by several countries in eastern Europe - may I ask, when will they be integrated?

 

[MattyG]

I have a lingering question as to why the two cultures 'sicilian' and 'romanian' have not been adapted yet?There already in the culture list, but I dont see them ingame.

The Romanian culture has one province, and is adopted by several countries in eastern Europe - may I ask, when will they be integrated?

Romania was in the Rumelia province. It's there, at leats in my version. But the others were not? I checked the province.csv and I'd made the changes there and then I remembered the provs_1419.inc file, which has them changed there to slavonic. So, I removed those entries. All better now.

The Sicilian issue is not one I have been convinced about yet. I think it needs more debate. Using the model for cultural difference I proposed, Sicily doesn't merit its own culture.