What does culture mean?

[spazzimo]

As it stands, Victoria 3 models culture and religion separately. I question this approach in combination with the game's pop system.

Instead I wonder if it's necessary to explicitly simulate culture or if just seperately simulating (in the context of the game) heritage, (native) language, and religion alone would be sufficient. Example you do not have a yankee pop, you have a european heritage, english speaking, protestant pop without attach a deliberate label (like english or yankee). Or an indian heritage, english speaking, hindu pop to model for example highly integrated sepoys.

As I understand, culture is composed of several aspects, including language, customs, beliefs, and (relevant for the game's time period and corresponding race theory) appearance. The games touches upon several of these aspect, most notably seperately modelling religion and culture. Which to me appears strange as often religious and cultural identity overlap, (and in my personal opinion religion is an aspect of cultural identity, e.i. being subordinated to cultural identity). Another aspect touched upon is language via select cultural traits (english/french/spanish speaking). I am ignoring the customs aspect of culture here as I think it would be too computationally intensive. But could be introduced as an heritage sub groups like iranic, sinitic, slavic, etc.

Within the game's context where culture and religion matter, namely the societal acceptance value, I have a question to you. Was there ever a case were a same language, same appearance, same religion was ever discriminated against? Or in other words were protestant British people ever discriminated against in the USA or insert other similar example here. It also points to a bigger question of there being any value to separating english, scottish, yankee, and dixie culture except for RP purposes. Please provide examples to correct me.

Also forgive me any grammar mistakes as I ryped this on my phone wich is not the best device for writing longer than one sentence texts.

 

[Helmut von Dandy]

Instead I wonder if it's necessary to explicitly simulate culture or if just seperately simulating (in the context of the game) heritage, (native) language, and religion alone would be sufficient.

The problem is performance. Every pop is a combination of workplace, job, culture, and religion, eg. English Protestant Laborers in Home Counties Shipyards is a single pop, even if there's 10,000 of them. The more pops, the worse performance. By splitting culture into heritage and language you've at least doubled the number of pops. That pop would need to become European English-speaking Protestant Laborers in Home Counties Shipyards, African English-speaking Protestant Laborers in Home Counties Shipyards, and potentially dozens of other combinations of heritage and language.

The whole point of culture in the game is as an abstraction to represent combinations of traits so that the number of pops is manageable and that a huge variety of attitudes and discrimination can be represented.

 

[Niko92]

Culture is really just "arbitrary" separator of people groups that are meant to make sure that certain pops get worse treatment in a country than others (lower wages etc.).

There are plenty of cases of people who spoke the same language and looked the same being discriminated against. The Irish in the US I think are the prime example (granted, most of them were catholic) or. Same with the Scots/Welsh in the UK, Romani people all across Europe (although not presented in the game), the various non-Han groups in China.

 

[ingenieux]

To quote myself :

The devs told me 7 700 potential pops just by mixing language-heritage-religion (to then multiply by number of professions) would burn computers left and right performance and that's why they did not make possible, for instance, hindu french speaking east-asian, or tengri spanish speaking middle-eastern.