I think raw luck and cultural concerns are probably more important, as would foreign state interference of course. (partially because Paradox does at least a tolerable job of banning people who get too nazi) and partially because of the kind of weird nerdery that demands a certain level of obscurity even in fascist ideologues. Of course, this instance of proactive indigenous power is quickly negated by being 1) somewhat random, based on a native uprising chance modifier, 2) easily gamed (by ideas or policies that reduce this modifier, down to 0% or below in some cases), and 3) incredibly easy to withstandfor most colonial powers a single regiment of 1,000 men (the smallest military unit in the game) can easily defeat native uprisings 7 or 8 times bigger, perhaps more with better technology. There is no score for the quality of life in the state (interestingly, this is in contrast to te next game, chronologically, Victoria II, which does consider quality of life, in its own way; we will actually see that VickyII, while it has its own problems, resolves some of EU4s stickier issues due to its different focus), no prize for a player whose careful management encourages simple human thriving rather than vast empire building. In the end, I concluded that we are not deciding what is happening, we are actually historians describing what has already happened. But the merest glancing comparison of the power the church wielded in public and private affairs in 1916, and the power it wielded in 2016 (over 30 years since the Soviets last gave a thought to the church, and nearly 20 years since the new Russian empire undertook the restoration of the church and its re-integration into the state) would show you that largely failed is a ludicrous exaggeration, seriously underestimating both the power of the Soviet State and just how rotten and overgrown the church was as an institution at the start of the 20th century. Join us!. So 90% is the cap. A big part of the problem is that mechanics like Happiness and Factions are entirely toothless. What treaties were regulating a common life between the Iberian Christian Kingdoms and the Moors? And thats not even touching on how the religion is portrayed by the game, which as stated before heavily resembles 19th century British protestant historiography on early modern Catholicism. Though honestly Im not so sure that the idea that republics are more accepting of minority cultures bares out historically.

Well, they can destroy a player colony. Importantly, declaring war tends to reduce stability (though not always). It takes me back to my childhood, when I broadcasted myself playing. There was a certain amount of violence done to my wrist in managing my least favorite mechanic of resettling pops from all my over crowded habitats. One of the diplomatic actions between monarchies is a royal marriage, sometimes if a royal marriage partner state of your dies without an heir their next one will come from your dynasty, and if a dynastic royal marriage heir dies, your state might inherit their throne (essentially similar to a vassal, with an option to entirely merge them into your state several decades later). (And I should note this process is not exclusive to Europe or to the early modern period. I have already heard from multiple college-level instructors that they have students coming into their classes specifically to learn the history behind these games, which in turn means that these games are serving to shape those students understanding of history before they even enter the classroom. The modern world is, I think, mostly a good thing, but it came with some catastrophic birthing pains. This is true but the power of, for example, the Catholic Church in Italy is also greatly diminished from what it was in 1900 vs. 2021. This is perhaps clearest in two areas: ideas and province culture. Ive spent a lot of time thinking about some of these mechanics in order to translate them between games, but with a STEM background Im very aware of my lack of knowledge and experience. Just to complete the idea that in the EU games you play an eternal abstraction of the state. So the game both glorifies conquest and the power of state, but also seems to toy with the idea that youre a vainglorious tyrant. Any state on the map is playable. The big problem with Indian treaties is both sides were making promises they didnt have the power to keep. Its a consistent conquest move North-to-South. Except in special cases, after 50 years, the junior partner may be integrated into the senior partner using diplomatic power or randomly inherited upon the death of a ruler. Scotland has rebelled more times than I know, including in 1821, the last year of the time frame for Europa Universalis. their decisions, And shortly thereafter the events are just that, random events, not direct results *if* your policies.. That effort created a demand for forests that were easier to record (and thus easier to calculate revenue maximizing utilization), so the forests were transformed into artificial grids of trees, using just a handful of tree species in neat rows which grew to more or less uniform heights. I appreciate that Paradox tries to give a nuanced portrayal of a wide variety of peoples and belief systems in EU4, even if their final result in those efforts can sometimes leave something to be desired. For a while anyway. This is a game about states, not nation-states; unlike in, say, Civilization you are not playing as a people, but as a political entity. All of which is to say I broadly agree with your description of how EU IV handles non-state peoplesI definitely dont think its beyond criticism, and I cant wait for the rest of this series. Well, there are specific things that give very big ahistorical bonuses to European nations. So culture Dutch, religion reformed, everything a nice tan color So Mr violent game snark where did all the locals go. I think there is definitely a bit of both, that is, I think Paradox (for EU4) explicitly leans into a particular kind of theory of history (while being aware of it) in order to create a certain game. And in earlier games (Europa Universalis III, in particular), the cultural assimilation process was bottom-up, uncontrolled by the player; provinces had a weighted chance to trigger a conversion event over time, leading to something closer to what we might expect: a slow, but steady drift towards a common national culture so long as the same state controlled the space which, due to the weighting, accelerated with the Enlightenment (though I will say that probably this process ought to be more strongly connected to the printing press than the Enlightenment). Finally, I think the latest generation of Paradox games (Europa Universalis IV, Hearts of Iron IV, Crusader Kings III and Imperator) are particularly interesting compared to many of the older titles because of a change in design philosophy at Paradox over the years. I spent 3 years in Iraq and I couldnt stomach the popup event decisions in the mod for that country. And as far as these things go it was rather quick, though a bit slower than EU4 depicts, the layering of swedishness over the native scanian culture was admittedly helped by a bunch of factors (similar cultures, the corresponding danish identity always having been rather weak and tenous and an upper-class thing, etc.) If you do the same replacement of people, territory, government, religion, and culture of your country in EU3, the game mechanically accepts that youve made your state fairly equivalent to a state that started out in Holland, and the remaining differences can all be leveled over timeor increased again, for that matter. I never contextualized it as forced resettlement more than paradox simply failing in their simulation to properly simulate migration mechanics, True, post-2.2 the resettlement mechanic is basically a patch for the new economy being broken, but its been around since the earliest versions of the game, and generally represents some form of the government telling you what job to work and where. Theres a reason the civic that improves resettlement costs is called Corvee Labor. (though I do note that its relative: Compared to the contemporary Civilization Games EU2 had a massively more important internal politics since rebels could actually wreck your game in a way that never happened in Civ). What changes in the early modern period is that the level of state capacity, at least in Europe (because other areas of the world had high state capacity in much earlier periods) rises tremendously, making radical efforts at social state-legibility possible.). Part of it, especially with the Hearts of Iron series (which simulates WW2), is that they dont want to show those atrocities since it encourages people with poor intentions. It could be argued that the process by which the player develops provinces in their state reflects this process of legibility, such that when the player clicks the button to spend resources developing the tax base, or production or manpower of a province what they are actually doing are things like registering households for taxation and conscription or seizing and privatizing common land (a process known as enclosure) to render it liable for taxation and so on. Those are those consequences of you actions (to the state at least), and happy welcome to the age of nationalism! Institutions spawn in Europe. Oh yes, I think youre right. So the key problem wasnt really the centralization, but everything else. In some ways its the highest praise for whoever wrote the events for the ss state, just made me question if the author shouldnt be institutionalised. Examples of these sorts of failed top-down cultural initiatives are practically endless; it is very hard for states to intentionally effect mass cultural change by main force as an intentional policy. Now if you outpace what EU4 thinks is development growth over time you can get a few percent more people (or a few percent fewer if you fall behind), but its not much of a bonus. In CK2 culture change was more random, slower, and also to a degree bottom-up; you usually see at as local people adopting the customs of their higher-ups, but there were other options. Of course this still has flaws in the ways you stated; its a binary system, is far too quick and easy, causes no unrest, and does not model the human effects, particularly on the low classes who suddenly are speaking an inferior tongue to their rulers. Instead, these interactions are viewed entirely through the states eyes, where increased legibility leads to increased state power, which is good. At which point my son walked over and was well pan across those happy colonies. And second, what ought teachers of history know about these games and take into account if they find themselves teaching students for whom Paradox is the historical mother tongue and actual history only a second language? Most cultures and religions in the game are portrayed much more positively. You do have Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act, and the Black Hills gold strike, but more often what you end up with is the whole state capacity issuethe United States government did not have the capacity to prevent settlers from breaking the treaties and to provide adequate oversight of the Indian agents. Yes, this is a period (in Europe) of rising urbanization and population growth, but not generally as the result of state action. Oh, and for Culture Change my (swedish) bias is to consider the swedification of the Skne province, which, while it involved deportations, forced billeting of soldiers, and various other nasty tricks of the state, largely involved a kind of replacement of the ruling and intermediate classes (replacing danish priests with swedish ones, having most of the danish magnates relocate to Denmark or be replaced, etc.) Partially, but local autonomy covers a lot of things, including the rights of nobles, rights of provincial assemblies, etc. Including the extent to which layers of nobility and grandees can obfuscate questions like so how much tax revenue are we actually getting from these peasants anyway by pocketing a large share of the tax revenue themselves. But early modern states werent merely systematizing forests to render them legible, they were systematizing everything to render it legible to the state not merely trees but also farms and also farmers, also burgs and burghers. indigenous negotiators getting up and walking out from a treaty negotiation where the US demands are perceived as unacceptable or insulting, only for the US to keep negotiating with whatever few natives havent yet left the room as if they still spoke for everyone, and as if their decisions and concessions were still fully binding over the peoples whose representatives had left. Sometimes kings and empires do last and do have permanent impacts on the underlying structures!). Moreover, even once this process was done, what the state had gained was often the illusion of knowledge, possessing lots of uniform statistics which did not show important local knowledge about conditions on the ground (leading to things like, for instance, the failure of efforts at massive, state-run farms; farming is a very localized thing and the absence of local knowledge of seasons and soil conditions often produced catastrophe). Players dont just make military decisions, but are also responsible for diplomacy (which, unlike in many other games, is not vestigial here good alliances and friendly relationships are crucial to survival and the diplomacy system is fairly developed), public works construction and budgeting decisions. This command would set the culture of the Neva to your country's primary culture. Once the progress reaches 100, an event will fire changing the province's culture to: Ex: If you have -60% culture conversion cost, provinces will change culture 60% faster. There are some exceptions, of course; states are, for instance, generally effective at getting people to learn new languages (but much less effective at getting them to abandon old ones). Also the mean time to happen mechanics guiding these interactions meant youll never know when exactly this would happen maybe tomorrow, maybe never. You can deport an unaccepted culture of religious province to the new world. The state has precise knowledge at all times of how much manpower they have available state-wide, how many sailors, exactly how much money and so on. If you want that sort of thing, I would recommend King of Dragon Pass or Six Ages. We hear a happy sound, and our state now has more power and it seems like everything is good because everything is good for the state. Sending a peace offer in favor of yourself is presented as a fair and just offer, if you send a diplomatic insult you get a mock I guess they took our words as an insult, how strange, and if your fort gets sieged (and you turned on the notification for that) it will mention something along the lines of our fort is under siege, but they shall break on it like waves on the cliffs. (or accidentally failed and lost you your investment) which, to be fair, isnt neccessarily the worst implementation of colonization from the POV of an early-modern state. Wouldn't the max reduction be a permanent -90% though if one was playing as Karaman running Religious, Influence-Religious Policy and with the Englightment embracement? That leads people to thinking that they understand history because theyve played EU4. You can do that if you are willing to go through the very fun and engaging experience of holding several thousand Dip for a few decades. But the player is never confronted with the implications of their choices; there is no reduction in the provinces development on account of the mass death or deportation and unrest doesnt even go up during the process. Victoria 2 is the bachelor uncle of its generation. You see lots of stories about e.g. One of the options for said event is to murder all of them because even noncombatant unbelievers deserve death. There is also the notification of coring provinces We shall defend it to the last drop of peasant blood, and in general a series of tongue in cheek comments that are meant to position the player as comically callous against the commoners of the country. Ibn Khaldun, who Our Pedantic Host has written about, was very familiar with the Moslem North African/Spanish kingdoms when he wrote his theory of history book. Anderson argues that the real agent of this process in the early modern period is the combination of mass literacy (generally in the vernacular, that is local spoken, language rather than a fancy lingua Franca like Latin) with the printing press and the mass commercial literature it produced (expressed by Anderson more or less as the printing press plus capitalism) combined finally with the movement away from personal rule through hereditary monarchy and divine right that occurred with the Enlightenment. While obviously not a morally sound act, it makes more sense that it costs diplomatic points than military, and is completed within the timescale the game represents. While it is alternate history, it is so well fleshed out it plays better than the original games in many ways. in Victoria 2, the game tracks populations of people of various classes/religions/cultures trying to fulfill their needs for goods like clothing and gradually moving between careers in ways the player can only limitedly influence by, e.g., increasing the salaries of teachers so more people will become teachers to raise the literacy rate to raise the chances that people will choose other literacy-requiring professions. Wouldn't the max reduction be a permanent -90% though if one was playing as Karaman running Religious, Influence-Religious Policy and with the Englightment embracement? But this specific frame is something that a player really needs to be aware of when using EU4 to think about history, particularly because (and well come back to this concept later) the tremendous persuasive power of a simulation. I might be shooting a few soldiers, but I believe thay have word for your action in game lets see its. But while these eventually went bad, dont ignore the decades of history where things were quiet. And so my advice to teachers who find their students coming from EU4 to the classroom is to foreground the human consequences of those state-centered policies. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding. I particularly wanted to discuss Paradoxs games, as compared to other historically rooted games, because I think Paradoxs oeuvre is a particularly rich vein to mine. On the one hand you want the player to be able to change history in various ways, but on the other hand in order to be a recognizably historical game the game world need to at least somewhat cohere to history as-it-happened (hence the various nudges and cheats) secondly is the problem of to what extent is what happened in history actually the most likely outcome? If we would redo 1066 a thousand times, how many of them would end up with William on the throne? Collections: Is the United States Exceptional? States can be members of the HRE gaining certain bonuses and restrictions. Im not sure why these bonuses are ahistorical. The period from (say) 1440 to 1821 is when most of the important institutions of the modern world, i.e., industrial capitalism, liberal democracy, etc., developed, and they did develop in Europe. Like the Tsar being the ruler of all Slavs. 2. Another thing to point out is that Paradox games always has a kind of tension between history as it happened and alternate history stuff, on several levels. It is precisely because Paradoxs games are serious that I am going to subject them to serious historical criticism, which may at times be a touch harsh. Theres also whatever you want to say about Belgium, where theyve basically drawn a line and said, North of here we speak Flemish; south of here we speak French except for Brussels., On the other hand, while Quebec is not a modern phenomenon, as they got cultural exemptions for both language and religion as soon as the British conquered New France, Scotland has rebelled more times than I know, including in 1821, the last year of the time frame for Europa Universalis. That said, for reasons we are about to discuss, these forces get much stronger in the early modern and modern periods, worldwide). There are two significant problems here. It is interesting that Victoria 2, the game set in the era in which colonial powers did what most closely resembles map painting for the sake of map painting, is actually the game which least incentivizes expansion for expansions sake and give you the most reasons to pause and actually consider carefully whether pursuing expansion into a given area is actually worth it or if the resources could be better spent elsewhere. Were going to get to these in Part III.

Catholics were 90% as good, eastern Orthodox were 80%, Muslims were 70%, Hindus, Taoists, Buddhists, (essentially all of non Muslim Asia) were at 50%, sub Saharan Africans at 20% and native Americans at 10%. For a Crusader Kings analogy, its like when the Crusaders who had been there for 10 years and established alliances and footholds suddenly found reinforcements from Europe attacking their local allies. So you do not play as a ruler, nor a family of rulers, nor as a government, nor as a people, you play as a state. Since pops didnt migrate on their own, you would have to periodically round up a bunch of unemployed people and ship them off to a mining world on the other side of the galaxy, an action that in reality probably involves a good bit of violence. Now I understand what the game is trying to simulate. Yes, but legibility also covers a lot of things. I applaud the folks at Paradox for making such an effort to try to model those processes, even if in some cases they fall short. You converted the culture at the last minute in EU4 and now youre surprised to find a bunch of peasants speaking the wrong language and unhappy to be ruled by a state thats foreign to them? Yeah, this kind of seems ass-backwards : AFAIK generally Empires dont care about ethnic assimilation, in fact letting the various ethnies to rule themselves as long as they pay tribute, specifically as can be seen in Muslim Empires meanwhile Republican-style Nation-States were very big on ethnic assimilation, often forbidding the use of regional languages ? This comes out clearest in the way that the game treats non-state organizations: it either re-conceptualizes them as states, or reduces them to largely predictable, mechanistic systems to be managed by states. My issue with accepting autonomy as a neat stand-in for legibility is that autonomy starts at zero in most core provinces. Have a topic you want me to post about? That is, you know food will deplete until the harvest season, but all you have to rely upon for the exact length you can stretch your rations is the questionable word of your advisors. It forcibly and suddenly increases the legibility of the province, and as a consequence, the people there hate your governance for a generation or so. If you do so in EU4, the game will always treat you as fundamentally Byzantine, and give you bonuses and nudges to do Byzantine things: youll be better at hiring mercenaries (a Byzantine national idea) but not get Dutch bonuses to the range at which you can trade; if your now-supposedly-Dutch state conquers territory in Asia Minor the people will accept your rule more quickly (due to missions), but youll never have an originally-Dutch states increase to how many of your people want to move to South Africa; if you turn over control of your country to the AI itll be inclined to conquer land all the way back in the Balkans/Asia Minor, because the state called Byzantium is fundamentally railroaded toward wanting to conquer land there. Scott notes that human societies are not generally, by their nature, legible or visible to states. This command would set the culture of Skaraborg to that of the country you are currently playing as. Weve essentially now discussed how that vision of history tends to hide the agency of things which are not states (institutions, peoples, polities, movements, etc), but it also tends to wildly overstate the power of states. I believe native uprisings are disabled for AI colonies because the AI isnt smart enough to deal with them. You simply dont see the folkways of the population or whether they regularly say God bless the king versus God damn the king. At most you have a number that vaguely represents how happy the people are and that you can poke upwards or downwards by spending money on luxuries or adopting policy changes or whatever. Im not sure what you mean about penalty? 1. It may not display this or other websites correctly. Violent game and stuff just sarcasm and teasing.So then later I was all cheerful and talking about ending the EU4 game I was playing with the Dutch Republic being the first great power, this that and other thing and most of the (random) new world was all happy dutch proto Canada. With climate change, these plantations suffer greatly and in the last decades, a lot of effort was taken to change them towards more suitable mixed-deciduous forest types. The best place to find me is on twitter @BretDevereaux Yes you do, otherwise you wouldnt have raised the issue in the first place. Is definitely a problem, though one that was created to solve another problem. Seems obvious to me, but I guess thats dependent on how someone frames it. That is going to matter a fair bit that the game encourages players to see themselves not merely as the big, successful imperial states, but also as smaller, weaker states fearful of imperial neighbors (something well return to next week). A question on a post? Thats how EU4 to Vic2 models it, and Ill admit to delight every time someone complains. (The mechanic for the remaining differences: there are eight sliders tracking, e.g., your trade policy between free trade and mercantilism that you can slowly nudge over time. Sort of. I also really hope you do a deep dive into Kingdom Come: Deliverance as well one day too, I know youve made some off-hand comments about it before! So I think the increased manpower is meant to represent something else, something historical in how the French were about to recruit more men. Culture Conversion represent the spread of a country's primary and accepted cultures through its land. Ive already suggested two good starting places, but to reiterate them, you might begin by reading J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (1998) and B. Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983). It might be fun with a computer game that *did* simulate everything under the hood, and then presented the player with scarce and uncertain information, having to rely on advisors who might not be trustworthy and who push their own agenda, and so on. So maybe in this game, the player is not the king, but rather the eternal Talleyrand. EU4 likewise privleges state action as the primary motivator of culture change in another way: the culture of provinces. But I would suggest for the student looking into this to ask some hard questions about the costs and tradeoffs of those processes. Id forgotten about that. And in EU2 province culture was basically set at game start and, apart from a few hard coded changes, didnt change at all. The fact that its the only religion in the game that gives you a penalty for following it should tell you what to expect. The HRE is a special case the constituent states are states, but theres an HRE overtop of them that elects an emperor, has some powers within the HREs area, and can (if the emperor is very successful) eventually be reunited into a true state like it was under the Carolingians. JavaScript is disabled. I dont want to say that these games are fascist. There is no sense that sometimes increased state power is actually bad for the people that the state nominally protects or works for, even though as Scott points out with case study after case study, historically rising state administrative capacity could be very bad (though it could also be quite good) for the subjects of those states. EU4 is a grand strategy computer game made by Swedish developers Paradox Interactive in which the player plays as an early modern state not a ruler, but the state itself guiding its strategic and operational (but not tactical) decision making from 1444 to 1821. It disrupted the small ecological processes which enabled the forest to renew itself after cutting, such that, a century in on the project, the Prussian forests began to experience Waldsterben (forest death). A dominant culture in a locale but which is a minority across the entire state generally does better in a republic assuming that dominant culture is dominant enough within the franchise to deliver representation. I always felt a bit of ambiguity about who exactly are we role-playing in EU4, precisely because of the reasons described in this post. I actually think Imperator especially with its overhaul does have a theory of history, but it is a lot more interested in social history (thus the care to model pops). It would seem that their laudable goal of not creating a war crimes simulator has some unfortunate side effects. Pops do a good job of making the galaxy feel less lifeless and making you pay some attention to the ethics and opinions of your citizens, but I definitely wouldnt say that Stellaris deals with the hidden costs of state power in any meaningful way. Its also much better supported. The game actually has personal unions, with one state being the major partner, and the other as a junior vassal, i.e.