Chinese Culture Split

[tanner918]

(Originally from #2784)

• As it is in the base game CK3, China will be represented by one large Han culture, but it seems like quite a few people in the dev diaries wanted this to be broken up more (it would also help with better mapping to EU4/EU5). As such, it should be considered whether to create new region-based Chinese cultures, like how its setup in the other Paradox games.
  • These region-based cultures could maybe just be made by using Han as a base and changing 1 or 2 traditions to give a little variety.
  • We will also need to consider how these region-based cultures would be mapped to.
    • For example, we could say ALL Chinese cultures in a particular region will map to its relevant region culture, which would make the game a bit more historical, but would then require us to have a fallback mapping for Chinese cultures outside of China, which would likely just end up being the base Han culture, which could lead to large Han blobs outside of China if they expand too much.
    • The alternative would be to instead map specific Imperator cultures to specific CK3 region cultures so that they always map to that (excluding things like the sinicized Baiyue/Dongyi/Bashu cultures described below). This would break up the blob a bit more, but could result in the regional cultures in ahistorical places.
    • We could also combine both of the above, map ALL Chinese cultures to the region culture based off where they are located in China, and use specific region cultures as fallbacks for outside of China so there's no huge Han blob.
• In Imperator, the closest thing to "Han" would be the Chinese culture group, which represents the Huaxia identity typically used before the Han identity emerged.
  • The Huaxia identity pretty much just included the cultures present in the Chinese culture group in Terra-Indomita. But the Han identity covers a bit more than this to also include peoples like the Sinicized Baiyue (Yue culture group), Dongyi (Yi culture group), and Bashu peoples. Although, the Han peoples living in the former Baiyue regions, for example, also seem to have a decent Northern Han genetic makeup due to the large migrations into the region coming from the Huaxia core regions. So, simply mapping these to their relevant Sinicized regional cultures might not make perfect sense.
    • It would likely make sense to just map the Baiyue/Dongyi/Bashu cultures to their CK3 unsinicized cultures, and just map any Chinese culture to the relevant regional/sinicized culture
• We could then maybe modify the “Sinicize Area” Great Project they are adding to account for the regional cultures and unsinicized cultures.
  • We could try modifying it in one of two ways: 1) Have the Great Project convert the area to a hybrid Sinicized culture (with Chinese Heritage?); 2) Have the Great Project give the culture in the area the new Sinophilic culture tradition.
    • Should it maybe do both, in steps? First, give the Sinophilic tradition to represent the culture beginning to adopt Chinese practices, then if the Great Project targets counties with cultures that already have the Sinophilic tradition, instead create a new hybrid culture with Chinese Heritage? If we do this, we could then maybe have the Sinophilic tradition be the condition that is set on whether a realm can adopt Meritocratic.
    • We could maybe also have something that allows a ruler of a non-Chinese, non-Sinophilic culture to willingly try Sinicizing their culture/region bringing themselves closer to China.
      • If they are the culture head, we could maybe just give the Sinophilic tradition to their culture, but if they aren’t we could maybe create a divergent culture that gets the Sinophilic tradition.
  • OR, should “Sinicize Area” give priority to converting regions to their historical Chinese regional cultures first, then worry about the about hybrid culture stuff if the region doesn’t have a historical regional Chinese culture?
    • For example, “Sinicize Area” around the Fujian Province will always convert the counties to Min Chinese, regardless of the cultures currently present there. But, since there is no historical Chinese regional culture for around the Island of Borneo, it instead goes through the above mentioned hybrid culture steps?
  • Should this Great Project also be how the de jure land of the Hegemony of China expands?
    • First, you must properly assimilate the people of the area into Chinese culture (have the region be of a culture with Chinese Heritage), then doing the Great Project again will finally de jure drift it to be under the Hegemony of China?
    • This could help slow down Chinese expansion as they’d only be able to assimilate and de jure drift regions that currently border the Hegemony, and it’d be more realistic.
    • This would likely require setting it so de jure drift is disabled for h_china