New culture system

[Sp4]

I believe I know roughly how it works now but I've also reached the conclusion that buildings that give cultural influence bonuses are now pointless.

Anyone else play around with this yet and tried to figure things out?

[Hooahguy]

From what I can figure out, the culture point buildings are no pointless, they are actually vital to tipping the balance. CA didnt word their explanation well. From what I can understand, culture will never be 100% one way or another. Rather it will be like a scale: you can put more weight to your side of the scale with your own culture buildings, but that wont completely remove the other side. So basically the other culture will always be there, it wont just be as much as yours. Now they just have to reduce the public order penalty for different cultures so its not a death knell if there are other cultures there.

[Slaists]

The culture buildings are more important than ever (on VH, legendary difficulties at least). Without those: you'd be stuck with PO penalty +20 or so from "foreign culture" just from the local traditions. Culture buildings + the tech is what tips the scale in your favor.

and the equilibrium state is easy to work out from the province overview screen.

Example: I am hellenic. I own the all the regions in the province, but it has +2 local desert tradition. Let's assume I have +8 as my cultural influence (from traditions, tech and some temple). In this case, without any characters present, the equilibrium would be 80% hellenic, 20% desert culture.

8 + 2 = 10 (total culture influence); out of that 80% = 8/10 (hellenic); 20% = 2/10 (desert).

let's add another temple giving +4 to cultural influence. In this case, the total cultural influence in the province:

12 + 2 = 14

out of this

12/14 = 86% equilibrium hellenic
2/14 = 14% equilibrium desert

So, culture buildings do have an effect.

And you really have to watch out for generals developing liking to other cultures. They can easily mess up a balanced province if left unchecked :)

[Sp4]

Okay, so I've played around with it a little longer and you're right and ignore what I said in my first post. It is in fact so bad that unless you want to spam temples everywhere, you pretty much have to build the one with most conversion thingy bonus now. This gets worse the further you go away from your home regions which makes sense I guess but Jesus, it is annoying and can the AI even deal with it, provided it now actually get big?

[Hooahguy]

The general consensus seems to be that this was a great idea, just poorly implemented.

[Mhantra]

I have one thing to add.

Dignitaries.

Dignitaries dignitaries dignitaries!

I have one with +12 conversion. I send him into a province I will be attacking in the near future and it starts to convert the province before I even get there. This makes transition easier. They can also cause a ruckus through action. Use them to convert provinces quickly and move them on.

Oh, and the culture conversion research. Do it. Early.