I really like the force immigration mechanic, because:

a) It's integrated with the other mechanics. It interacts with food, with manpower, with global settler increase, with unrest, etc. (This is where vanilla EU4's culture conversion mainly fails, imo.)

b) It's satisfying and not too micro-intensive: one click and you know that province is going to get culture converted. That feels fun. It's also really satisfying to me that as I increase global settler increase (e.g. via developing my provinces or with national ideas), that I know that the forced immigration timers are being sped up in the background.

c) It's predictable. How effective it is mainly depends on my planning.



I like the idea behind cultural assimilation but I don't like some of the details. (For those reading who haven't read the patch notes: note that patronize local arts no longer gives +cultural acceptance, making cultural assimilation a lot trickier.) Let's go over the a-c that make "force immigration" such a good mechanic in my opinion:

a) cultural assimilation is very well integrated with the other mechanics. It gets a great score here.

b) It's very micro-intensive and as a result not very satisfying, imo. If I want to reliably convert one province, I need to build a public school/university, wait until that's finished, then click on enforce language education, then build some other buildings, keep track of when cultural acceptance hits 100%, make sure that my prestige keeps being high enough, then click on cultural assimilation, then wait for a few decades and finally I get a popup saying that I've culturally converted one province.

That seems like a huge amount of clicking and micro-management to culturally convert one province. Imagine trying to convert ten or twenty provinces this way! It's almost easier and quicker to win a small war than it is to micro the start of the cultural assimilation of one province.

Yes, I know the cabinet can help a bit, but right now it can't build buildings. As a result it can only do some of the steps of the process above. And even then the cabinet isn't as efficient as the player is.

c) In the early game I can't afford universities everywhere and I don't have the tech for public schools yet. So in the early game I culturally assimilate a province by spamming buildings and terrain improvements in it.. and praying that the terrain improvement events trigger quickly enough so that I reach 100% acceptance in that province. If I'm unlucky and the events don't trigger quickly enough, the decay sets in and I may reach a point where there's no way for me to spend money to increase cultural acceptance, other than a hugely expensive university. This randomness isn't very fun to me.

(By the way, can't I just pay for a local festival or something? It seems weird and not fun that I can literally run out of ways to get cultural acceptance, other than via an expensive university/public school => force language education.)



Personally I'd fix this by letting the player always have the option of culturally assimilating a province, even if cultural acceptance is not 100%. However, in that case it should be slower/more expensive.

And while the province is culturally assimilating, you can speed up the process via buildings, terrain improvements, forcing language education, etc. "Hey, I built a road and now the time to culturally assimilate is merely 40 years instead of 50 years, great! If I now build a mill, maybe I can cut another 10 years off that timer."

The "province is being culturally assimilated" status can also give a penalty (+ autonomy, - tax, +unrest, something like that) to encourage the player to actually support their cultural assimilation with buildings, edicts, etc.

This also seems like the more positive approach. You no longer tell the player "no, you can't culturally assimilate yet, you haven't jumped through these hoops yet." Instead you say "if you have the prestige and diplo power, you can culturally convert, sure. And once you started that process, here are things you can do to speed it up."

This additionally solves the weird problem that pluralism/universalism is actually better for cultural assimilation in the early game imo. After all, pluralism/universalism gives me unaccepted culture base cultural acceptance and cultural acceptance decay modifier, which is critical in the early game to actually get the cultural acceptance process started. Yes nationalism gives cultural assimilation rate, but in the early game the bottleneck is getting the process started in the first place. With this suggested alternate system, cultural assimilation rate and thus nationalism/ethnicism would become better for cultural assimilation, as you'd expect.



Finally, thanks again for making this amazing mod. I don't think I can go back to vanilla EU4 anymore.