Tinto Maps #4 Poland, Ruthenia, Baltic Feedback

[SaintDaveUK]

Smolenskian as Belarusian

 

[SaintDaveUK]

How viable is the Novegradian conlang project for Novgorodian dialect names?

Grammar of the Novegradian Language — Names

www.veche.net

 

[SaintDaveUK]

Lol you put a strikethrough on the post,

To make it clear that the idea was abandoned because others came up with better sources

 

[Pavía]

I also hope this issue can be addressed. Currently, this setup seems even less accurate than how the East Slavic culture group is handled in EU4. Not only does it equate Russian culture with the broader East Slavic group (of which Russian is just a part), but it also risks significantly complicating—or even making impossible—the process of cultural unification for cultures associated with the Ruthenian language.

@SaintDaveUK, my apologies for the direct mention, but considering these points, would it be possible to assign a distinct Ruthenian culture group for Ruthenian cultures, rather than grouping them under the Russian one? In this way, the East Slavic group could be placed above both, assuming the existing Slavic group is not already sufficient. Otherwise, how would tags with these cultures be able to unify their cultural group from a gameplay perspective?

Hi there! Dave has brought this to my attention, and it also may be relevant to poke @Dennis [UA] , after: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...ut-east-slavic-culture-labels-in-eu5.1743555/

What is shown there are the Culture Groups, which are a dynamic label that we use to group different cultures, and add flavour to them. As the main mechanics related to culture, such as Cultural Acceptance/Tolerance, Cultural Assimilation, and Culture Wars are tied directly to Cultures and Languages, they are not so relevant compared to EU4 Culture Groups.

Here you have the tooltip with all the information about a culture, and also the Russian culture group.

This is the status of the cultures of the region in 1337:

And this is the status of the languages - 1. Language Families 2. Languages 3. Dialects:

Therefore, the Russian culture group is not so relevant as you might think, gameplay-wise. However, something that could be done to reduce the redundancy of having a "Russian" language, dialect, and culture group, which may be confusing, is to rename the culture group to "Rus' ", which also fits its descriptions.

 

[Aldaron]

The devs have stated that locations does not represent only one settlement, but a territory with rural population around it.
Another thing is that other users wtote that they used the highest possible population estimates everywhere, except for the Americas.

It is correct that locations do not represent only a settlement, but also its hinterland.

It is not true that we used the highest possible estimate. We used a source that covers the whole world and used it as a base. We have actually used a bit higher estimates in certain areas outside of Europe as we felt it was too little.

I mean sure but 5x the population of the capital and biggest town in the area, its a bit much.
Poland was not as densely populated as depicted in game and Im happy with going towards the higher estimate but that is just a bit too far.

in the Brandenburg/Prussia flavour thread they depicted the Mark Brandenburg having close to a million population while all german sources I checked on that would put the number at a fifth of that. I assume there needs to be a review of pop numbers in central europe before release.

America's population is one the hottest topic when it comes to demographics. Low estimates are as valid as high ones. We have not used the lowest. We decided months ago to make it bigger before the release (we are aiming to around 32 M for the continent).

Several regions suffered from a bug that was transfering population from other regions and inflated the populations massively (such as in the case of Germany where it ended up having almost double the population we assigned at first). This is being corrected currently.

 

[Aldaron]

Out of curiosity, which one? Personally I like McEvedy/Jones for their no-nosense approach but I get that's it a bit dated, so to say...

And politicised too! It's tough, I hope you guys go sort of the middle ground... But it also depends how are you going to portray post-contact diseases, which although attested somewhat is still guesswork in many places.

And especially how do you treat the recurring diseases, or how do you treat the differences in colonial growth, which is incredibly important - Québec and new England doubling every 25 years, while Carribbean is population sink, shrinking depending on immigration. But I guess it's also a question for other colonies, especially in tropical regions of the world.

We already said that we used McEvedy in one Tinto Talks. It is true that this book is rather outdated but it is still rather used as source for many modern ones and more importantly, it covers the whole world, which helps with keeping consistency.

As someone that has been reading about demographics in general, and medieval demographics in particular (several years before I joined Tinto, even), I can tell you that everyone (has to) work with estimations so expecting a "correct" answer is not attainable. Even the "use more modern data" claim is not even that useful because in many cases the "novelty" is using a different method to calculate something, not that it is necessarily more accurate.

What I am trying to say, and specially for those that lose their nerves when discussing about estimations is that this is a highly debatable matter and very much up to interpretation.

The America's topic is indeed very polarized politically speaking and personally it is nothing I am going to get into. Internally we have decided an approach that people are, obviously, free to criticize, but we expect and hope that it is respected.

As people are also trying to propose more towns and cities, let me clarify (I think that it was already said, but whatever), that we are looking for towns (5.000 people in 1337) and cities (25.000 people in 1337). If data is provided we can consider adding them. Most collections of data that we have managed to get (Chandler, Bairoch, de Vivre, Malamina, etc) have already been used. The lack of data is specially dramatic outside of Western Europe and specially Europe in general.

 

[Aldaron]

The actual town/city itself needs to have that population, right? Not the location overall.

Exactly. In real life.

 

[Aldaron]

Thanks for the answer. How about some niche cases, when a location includes multiple urban settlements which one-by-one don't reach the threshold but together they do? For example, could a location with two settlements with ~3000 inhabitants each qualify for "town" status? Or a location with a settlement of ~15000 and two other settlements of ~5000 to "city" status?

Only individual, but post them just in case. I am curious now.

 

[Aldaron]

Personally, I’d welcome more flavor and detail across all of Eastern Europe. Right now, compared to Western Europe, it does feel a bit barren—not necessarily in a gameplay sense, but in terms of reflecting the historical and cultural richness of the area. I’ve actually been to both Nowy Sącz and Lublin, and they’re amazing places with deep history and unique character. You can really feel how important they must have been in the past.

Unfortunately, Eastern Europe was barren in comparison to a big part of Western Europe. I do empathize with the feeling of not having towns represented in the map, but we consider consistency to be important and we try our best to achieve it so every region plays under the same rules.

That being said, I appreciate your kind approach and the maps you provided (if I can overstep a bit, I would love if they were a bit higher resolution) and I have saved them for my personal collection. It will be useful for any future touch we make in the region.

 

[Aldaron]

Thank you for replying! This is insightful.

Nevertheless, this response is confusing to me, and probably not only to me.

You have included, as an example, several locations in Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia as towns, but from any research I was able to do, either there is far too insufficient data or estimates are far below the 5k limit. Do you have any good evidence, for example, that Iverness was larger than, say, Sandomierz, Lublin, Lviv, Kalisz?

I have not added those and I prefer to not touch others work without discussing things first.

You include Wrocław and Poznań as towns, but you don't include Lviv or Lublin, despite those most likely being fairly comparable settlements at the time.

There isn't much reliable data that can tell us for certain what the populations of these places were, but several locations in Poland and Ruthenia would approach this 5k threshold.

I would be fascinated if you could share any sources you've used for this!

I already mentioned the sources in the post you quoted.

Wroclaw and Poznan do appear in several of those sources but not the other cities, which is why I did not include them. The point is that "mosty likely" is guessing and while every estimate is also a guess, it is an educated guess that several people with better understanding on demographics than me have done.