Quote Originally Posted by Zarax
Well, imvho what EB is missing right now is a truly effective way to represent cultural assimilation and intermixing.
While the government system is great I feel the long term environment to be slightly "static"...
I feel (again imvho) that there should be a way to be able to integrate at least a bit more some regions in your empire even when there is a great cultural difference.
I'm not saying it should be easy or widely available but as in a way EB already got buildings simulating huge terraforming why not having something that does the same with population?
A structure representing elites becoming closer to the conquerors or migration of player's faction natives in the area (isn't what the "colony" building should do in theory?) that takes huge amounts of time and money but allows you to put a closer goverment type could be a quick and relatively easy solution...
Truly converting the majority of a population from one culture to another takes a very long time under most conditions. Some of the best examples in our period are the Hellenistic Kingdoms, and even they weren't truly "Greek", but rather had pockets of Greeks in the midst of a far larger number of natives. Even Rome took a very long time to assimilate Italy, to say nothing of the rest of the world. And most of the cultural conversions I hear people requesting are FAR faster than that - so quick as to be quite unrealistic. EB does capture this pace pretty well with the Roman Reform system, yet even there the biggest complaint we hear is that it "takes too long" to get from one reform to another.

So even if we could adequately capture these conversions (and there are some additional surprises in store in the next release), the time periods will often prove unsatisfactory. If we represent the true pace of cultural conversion, people are unhappy because in game terms it's perceived as too slow. If we change it up to meet the desires of the masses, we would no longer be true to history. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.