Culture

Culture (Page 1)
Unlike in vanilla where all cultures are roughly sorted to 4 types ( primary, cultural group, accepted and non-accepted ) which give fixed modifiers on unrest, income and manpower, we created a brand-new cultural system that is more complicated, realistic and flexible. This system has two major parts: Cultural Acceptance and Cultural Assimilation.

Cultural Acceptance(CA) is basically a two-way selection between the country( or say, your majesty) and its provinces. The better you treat your provinces, the better they respond to you. Each province has its own cultural acceptance and a related modifier that affects unrest, income, GC, manpower, autonomy and so on. As always, other elements of CU, like literacy and province edicts, interact with CA closely.

Cultural Assimilation(CAS) is a replacement of vanilla cultural conversion mechanic, which is removed in CU. It does the same thing, but in a more realistic way. Assimilate a neighbor province with the same religion and similar life-style ( like Alsace for France ) could be somewhat easy, but converting Indian Sikhs to British loyal subjects? Well, that may take forever.

Cultural Acceptance (Page 2)
Cultural Acceptance(CA) has two parts: Base Cultural Acceptance (BCA) and Dynamic Cultural Acceptance(DCA). Province CA is generally the sum of its BCA and DCA, with the following exceptions: CA ranges from 0-100%, but BCA and DCA have no limits; CA of Empty provinces and colonies( before reaching 1000 population ) is fixed to 100%.

Base Cultural Acceptance is a rather fixed value that will not increase or decrease by time. It is affected by cultural type ( e.g. A culture officially recognized by the country has higher BCA than one that is not ), religious tolerance ( 5% per tolerance ), province literacy ( reducing BCA if the province has a foreign culture ), seperatism( -1% per year of seperatism ), effects and other factors.

Dynamic Cultural Accetance reflects people's opinion on your treatment to the province. Constructing a building( say, most of them ), enacting a benificial province edict, reducing taxes and so on will increase DCA, while letting your enemy occupy the province, removing a building, converting its religion, etc. will decrease it. Be aware: Province will not remember your deeds forever. Positive DCA will decay by 20% every 10 years, and negative DCA will slowly return to 0. Some ideas( like religious ideas) and effects affect DCA decay rate, so they are quite useful if you rely mainly on DCA to keep your province functional.

Cultural Assimilation (Page 3)
When Cultural Acceptance reaches 100 and the province has either a port or a neighboring province with your culture group, you can start to assimilate province culture via Cultural Assimilation edict ( in cultural edicts ). It will cost you some diplomatic power related to province development, but more importantly, a lot of time. During this process you should keep province CA above 90%, or the process will pause until you do something to rise it. You can stop cultural assimilation at any time, the current progress will be saved. But you need to spend diplomatic power again to restart it. When province owner changes, all progress together with DCA will be lost.

The speed of Cultural Assimilation mainly depends on development, geography and literacy. Large province takes longer to assimilate, but that is not a proportional relationship as in vanilla. Neighboring province with the required culture group will increase CAS speed by 50% ( 100% if with the primary culture ). The role of Literacy is a bit more complicated. Higher province literacy increase CAS rate, but remember literacy has a negative impact on BCA. Literacy difference ( abosulute value ) between the province and your country ( average literacy of all state provinces ) reduce CAS speed greatly, so equal education is recommended in later stage.

Other factors like buildings, religion and ideas also affect CAS speed. The details can be seen in Province Census - Cultural Assimilation edict.