MattyG said:
The Poll has closed and it's a dead heat.
I voted only for two german cultures, High and Low, but meant to vote for both High/Low and High/Middle/Low but miss-clicked the button.
Which means the real winner is to have three German cultures.
I am going to pass the baton now to Incompetant to flesh out the distribution of cultures among the new provinces.
Well, unfortunately this doesn't tell us on what basis they should be arranged. We can have:
1. High German, Low German, Dutch
2. High German, Middle German, Low German (with Dutch subsumed into Low German).
3. We divide up the HRE in an unconventional manner, based on e.g. loyalty to HRE, whether the economy is primarily urban or rural, type of political system that's traditional in that area etc.
Having Dutch separate as in 1. makes most sense in terms of dialects, and will give us better control over the cultural setup of Bavaria and Burgundy (who get Dutch, but unlikely to get Low German) and the TO (who get Low German, but never Dutch). It also gives more options for potential Dutch states of course.
Having Middle German separate as in 2. gives us better control over Swabia (may lose Middle German and keep High) and Bohemia (perhaps would get Middle German only).
Unconventional approach depends on how we do it. All I can think of is that the cities of the TO might conceivably have more affinity with those of southern Germany and indeed Hungary than they do with the Hansa cities. But that can be dealt with using Hanseatic culture. In any case, as long as we allow a fair amount of fluidity, we can make exceptions for particular provinces while basically sticking to plan 1. or plan 2.
So which is it going to be? The poll option says Low, Middle, High; but Low, High, Dutch wasn't an option, and there's been some confusion over what these words mean anyway, so I'd take the result so far as a generic vote for 'three cultures'. Then there's the question of whether or not that includes Hanseatic. With the events as they are, my preference is for 1, as the Low Countries have received a lot more attention than central Germany (which isn't much of a cultural region anyway).
If we go to four cultures, we can obviously implement plan 1 and plan 2 simultaneously. That would give a total of five predominately German/Dutch cultures in the game if we throw in Hanseatic as well. I don't think that's too extravagant given the complexity of the situation in the HRE, the number of majors that get involved and the huge number of provinces the area is going to have on the new map. But on the other hand, we're talking about an area that is relatively homogeneous culturally, so it's splitting hairs a bit to divide things up so much.
What I'll do is produce a plan 1 divide and a plan 2 divide, and see how they differ. The Hanseatic question is separate, but we already know pretty much where it will emerge if it does, so we can leave that one for later. As for culture tags, I'd say whichever options we pursue, the best approach is to leave Hansa (canary) and Dutch as they are, rename German to High German, and then use two new tags for Low German and Middle German. Things can then stay this way until we need to use the tags elsewhere in the world.
