manpower extracted from population, so a Ottoman army of 1M would actually result in a Constantinople with only women and children, thus having no work-force and the economy in shambles.
Manpower is already a function of “population”, abstracted from dev.
Make regiments cost
numberofmeninregiment in upkeep, and make production, trade power, all other economic outputs vary by the proportion of your maximum manpower you have in reserve. There you go: you now need to dynamically balance your total troops (and ships, why are sailors a different resource to manpower?) against your economy. No additional mechanics or performance overhead, no whacky POP behaviour.
realistic propagation of religion as to simulate the real internal battlesduring reformation, instead of a on-off switch off religion per province.
This is the most compelling argument I’ve seen for POPs, but I don’t think it stacks up well. The Reformation (for instance) wasn’t a case of individual people in Europe deciding that actually they were Protestants, it was a matter of elites changing their views or allegiances. In that light I think the provincial on/off works quite well, and we’d be better served by getting rid of missionaries than by implementing a gradual POP-assimilation process. If we wanted to further improve the EU model I would suggest tying religion to estates and estates into provinces: where do the provincial nobility’s allegiances lie? The clergy? The burghers?
Breaking down estates into more granular levels and introducing a peasantry “estate” would make this structure even stronger, and massively strengthen the rest of the game. POPs would distract from that rather than support or enhance it.
- colonization where actual people move to the new world at the price of population in their home country. Would also open up the failed expel minorities option again. And result in a new world with realistic culture distribution instead of a patchwork of old-world provinces and religion.
There are a number of ways to solve this in the existing system:
- Colonies cost manpower
- Colonisation slowly erodes development from your territories
More significant, though, is the observation that colonisation in the EU time period didn’t often hinge on moving thousands of people overseas. Any system that, prevented (for example) Portugal or a similar small state taking control of Brazil would be a bad system.
The further we move away from the idea that colonisation is about shifting people into new lands, and toward the understanding that it’s about co-opting and working existing peoples and power structures into the coloniser’s system of order, the better. POPs, again, would undermine rather than support that improvement. The vast majority of “European” settlers in the colonies were born there, and should have no bearing whatsoever on populations back home.
Like religion, I think this is another example of an issue (“colonisation happens too fast”) people think POPs will fix because they don’t understand how the existing system is failing to accurately represent history. The real challenges in colonising territory were about the difficulty of projecting power and maintaining control of distant lands, not about literally not having people to send there.
So EU needs to better model those challenges, which doesn’t require POPs at all. Implementing POPs, in fact, would generate all kinds of performance overhead and new further bugs and oddities in how the POPs behave distracting and quite probably exacerbating the problems that they were initially implemented to “fix”.
